So I guess in an effort to avoid doing work that I need to, I have decided to amaze you with another wonderful post mere days after my previous post. This video is a bit along the lines of the last one - in the sense that it's quite the illusion ^_^.
It's more like it's hard to wrap your mind around the way that gravity can be distorted here. And it's like what we perceive - what we assume is right based on our perception of the world - is just wrong.
As Prof. Landy mentioned, there are many cues in the world that give us a sort of way to understand the orientation of the environment around us. For example, the very tall straight things that show us which way is up and which way is down. And the fact is, that we get used to relating a vertical line or structure with up and down.
So as he said, if we are provided with stimuli that are skewed from the vertical, we still perceive the stimuli as if they were straight up and down. We basically assume that things are straight because we are so used to seeing them as such. And we end up assuming incorrectly.
Why do we go ahead with such confidence that the world we perceive is exactly as it is in reality? Well, there has been no real cause to show us that we are wrong - and the system our brains use to perceive the world is pretty accurate (pretty much correct).
Talking about perception makes me think less of the analytic understanding of just sensory data and more of the subjective nature of our perception. We are not programs that simply take in data. We make choices and actions that are based off of that data. And we perceive and make judgments based on how we perceive other people - other non-programs, if you will ^_^.
And that's where our perception can't be relied on as securely. That perception is skewed in the way that it is in the Optical Illusion above. Because ultimately, perception is subjective, and every person perceives the world in his or her own way - each influenced by an infinite number of factors like education, family, wealth, job satisfaction, intellect, religion, etc etc etc.
But despite that understanding, we still heavily rely on our own perception in the same way we trust it to tell us which way is up. And just as easily, those perceptions lead to assumptions. But of course because the assumptions are based on subjective data, they can very easily be wrong. And being wrong can lead to seemingly catastrophic results.
If we are to avoid the catastrophes, how are we supposed to ignore what our mind perceives as truth?
As a sort of way to answer that question, I'd like you to also just take a listen at one of the audio podcasts; they talk of an experiment where the input received from sight is altered. The results - quite intriguing (I found the part about the upside down cup interesting). [Also, forgive me for the odd way I'm sharing it - I haven't figured out a better way to share it yet...] Listen here.
The answer? We must adapt. How we should and how much we should adapt can only be found through trial and error (here is where we hope we are still smarter than simians, and that we learn after one mistake). But given that a change in sight required 10 days to function "normally", you can only imagine how long it would take to change an ingrained way you "see" other people (evaluate the actions and words of others).
The difficulty is only compounded by the ease with which we can return to our original state. It took 10 days to adjust to a flipped vision - but just a day or 2 to return to our original vision.
Now, I'm not saying it's impossible to change. In fact this experiment and several others only prove to show that we can change. But we don't have a huge headpiece that constantly forces us to change the vision we use to perceive the people around us.
So are we doomed to be forever entrenched in our perception, in the same way politicians seem to be stuck supporting the single voice of the party the belong to? I can only hope not - because otherwise, we will surely be in store for a lot of heartache.
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