beauty is in the eye of the beholder

I have an ongoing preoccupation with vision – not only ours, but that of other creatures. For us vision is such a dominant and personal way through which we experience the world, that it can be surprising to learn how limited it is in comparison to that of other creatures. We have more limited perception of colour – for example – than not just birds, but also lizards, amphibians and even many fish. The retinas …

the invisible gorilla

I have just read an article about a famous experiment (that you can try for yourself here…) in which a large number of people focusing on counting ball passes on a video are completely unaware of someone in a gorilla suit walking on screen, beating its chest to camera, then walking off. This counter-intuitive result is used to show how blind we can be to what we’re not paying attention to. This issue of attention …

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