An expert in perception explains to us why nothing is what it seems, but rather that it depends on what? From the context.
You are going up a staircase and suddenly you put your foot on the last step, and you realize that you made an unnecessary effort because there was no step there: your eyes deceived you. Has it happened to you? Don’t worry, you’re not sick, it’s normal. It’s about a perception problem.
“Human perception is the integration of the stimuli received by the senses (eye, ear, smell, touch and taste) with our experiences. Each sense has a part of the brain (or several) in charge of controlling it; this organ classifies the stimuli received according to our subjectivity and we organize them through language”, explains Dr. André Didyme-Dôme, psychologist with a master’s degree in communication, professor of theories of perception at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University.
That saying that prays ‘Nothing is what it seems‘ turns out to be very true. The doctor explains that “from philosophy it is stated that the senses deceive us, but this has a biological basis. Sometimes deception is caused by abnormalities or injuries to organs (tumors), other times by chemical or electrical problems in the brain (mental illness). They also occur due to the consumption of psychoactive substances that alter perception, such as hallucinogens.
But what if you don’t have any disease, you haven’t gotten into or taken anything strange, and yet you discover that the senses deceive you, it is because it is. What’s more, if it weren’t for that deception, we wouldn’t have cinema, magic, or art.
Cinema, for example, takes advantage of a natural condition of the eye to create the illusion of movement. “Cinema is based on the principle of permanence of the image on the retina. It was discovered by Peter Mark Roget, a physicist who was blinded by so many experiments he performed. He realized that by passing several images in sequence at a rate of 24 to 36 images per second, the eye stops seeing each image separately and sees movement. A pure illusion”, explains the expert.
“On the other hand there is the alteration of attention, one of the basic devices of learning. magicians use distraction to divert attention of the public towards one point, while in another place something is happening that we do not perceive”, he explains.
Another way to alter perception is by changing the context. «If they show me a photo of a horse and I have never seen one, I will not associate that image with that animal,» she exemplifies. Watch this video and be surprised:
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You already know how the senses deceive us. Do you have any experience to share with Vibra? Tell us!