sensation and perspective :)

Hey guys! This weeks blog is over the brain's sensations and perspectives! Do you ever just wonder why magicians can just blow our minds and we don't even notice half the time? Or how about looking at optical illusions and how they look as though they are moving but really it is our brain making it do that? Well I am here to maybe help ya out and understand how the heck our brain operates and just realize how freaking cool it is.

I read some articles over optical illusions and how our brain processes them and whatnot. I came across the pretty well known debacle of the dress. Is it white and gold or is it blue and black? Well in 2015 this hit social media and people went nuts. I'm here to tell ya that it really is just how our eyes and brains perceive color over periods of time. So our eyes and brains work simultaneously together and I'll explain how; first, light enters the eye through the lens with different wavelengths which are different colors, the light hits the retina in the back of the eye which starts up the neural connections to the visual cortex - this processes the signals to form an image. So when you're looking at things, your brain works instantly and processes colors and pictures and just everything in general that you see without you even realizing it. Jay Neitz, neuroscientist at the University of Washington, sees white and gold and states this, "Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminati and extract information about the actual reluctance, but I've studied individual difference in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual difference I've ever seen". Now if that just isn't bizarre to you, I have no idea what is, but lemme know what color y'all think it is in the comments! ;) 

Do you ever just sit and stare at optical illusions for hours or is it just me? Well funny story... I was looking at these optical illusions and lol not reading the stuff about them for this blog and then I noticed that like two hours went by. So maybe I'll share a couple with y'all :) But first, optical illusions basically happen when something deceives your eye to see something than it really is. So an optical illusion that really stuck out to me during the two hours of my staring would be the one called Motion Induced Blindness. This illusion happens by staring at the middle red dot while the blue "+"'s are spinning. You'll not even notice at first, but the yellow dots start to disappear and reappear constantly. Go try it for yourself - http://michaelbach.de/ot/mot-mib/index.html 
So the reason for this would be the Troller effect, which many of y'all probably do not know what that is because I didn't even that was until I researched it and this is what I came up with... Basically our brains cannot process so much information at one time, like right now you don't notice the sounds around you, or how your clothes feel against your skin, or even how your breathing is (Monsters in the Mirror)... which you probably notice all these things now, but our brain basically turns blind when thinking of all these different things at once. So when told to stare at something particular, your eye will go blind to all the other non-relevant things. After going and trying out that website, feel free to let me know how you thought about it! :)

Well I hope y'all learned some pretty new and cool things that our brain can do whether we are thinking about it or not!


xoxo, court ;)

Sources :)

Rogers, Adam. “The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress.” Wired, Conde Nast, 3 June 2017, www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/.


Stanley, Maclen. “Monsters in the Mirror: No Really, Literal Monsters.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 2 Aug. 2014, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/making-sense-chaos/201408/monsters-in-the-mirror-no-really-literal-monsters.