Beau Lotto's Argumentative Analysis

Illusion and sensory context does not come from the sensory information sent by our optic nerves but how the brain processes the information and relates them through our past experiences. In July 2009, Beau Lotto talks about the importance of context in sensory information in Oxford, England. In this Etalk, Beau stresses that “the sensory information that falls into your eyes is meaningless” and our brain that makes sense to these information are always changing. The speaker demonstrates his claim by asking the audience to read series of words with missing letters. He explains that the brain associates the arrangement of the letters and patterns to our pre-existing knowledge of language. He then moves on to proving the plasticity of our brain in redefining the normality showing two identical pictures of desert. After making the audience focus on red and green colors the norm is changed and suddenly the identical pictures are now different in hue. The speaker also defines …show more content…
In the talk, Beau asks the audience to focus on the dot between the green and red background for about thirty seconds and switch to the identical pictures of a desert. After doing the procedure the left picture appears to be under green light while the right image is in red light. Beau states that the phenomenon is cause by the plasticity of the brain to change the normality of vision. However, I think of it as the overstimulation of blue and yellow cones of the left eye and red cones on the right eye. Cones are cells in the retina that interprets colours (Lilienfeld, 2015, pg144). When I focus on the green and red colour, the cones in my retina that is responsible for that colour are stimulated and as I look at them for a long period of time the cones will become overstimulated. The desert images seems like they are under red and green light because the over stimulated cones are still trying to recover and go back to their