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  The amazing thing I found in last Thursday’s class was neither the picture with woman in the mirror/ skeleton nor the Rubik’s cube, but Paul’s picture about the rock. I used to think that optical illusion was made on purpose: skilled artists draw pictures to “cheat” people in an artistic way. But I’ve never thought it could happen in natural even if I have been together with the silly rocks in Geology for almost a whole semester. I was deeply impressed by the variety of nature, but more amazed by the unconscious part of our brain which brought us to a world that is more colorful than nature itself. More importantly, such a world is not based on naive daydreaming but built up with sophisticated and informed guess.

  Another thing that made me think a lot was the “flashing dots”. It lets me connect the physically existing brain with culture: people are born with incredible imaginations and various perceptions. While as we grow up in certain culture environment, some perceptions are accepted by other people while others are faded away because of disagreement. It’s not necessarily that those interpretations are wrong, but the conversation between consciousness and unconsciousness intelligently selected certain interpretations that people all agree on. Take money as an example, if a baby is given a hundred dollar bill, he/she will probably think it is a little drawing paper, a note pad or just a normal piece of paper. But as he/she growing up, he/she will eventually know it is actually a special piece of paper with purchasing value. If we think about the brain in this way, we can probably say that our brains form the culture in a large extent.