Section #1: Synopsis
Al Seckel is a TED Talk speaker, who specializes in visual illusion. In this TED Talk, Seckel starts off by introducing the audience of what illusions can do towards our minds. He then showed the audience of one specific illusion as his first demonstration, called “Crazy Nuts”. In this illusion, there are 2 nut bolts which the holes are perpendicular to each other, where a rod could go through both. How? Seckel then demonstrated how our eyes are playing tricks where we see something when it’s supposedly something else. In a sense, our mind violated our expectations of the illustration. In the next 10 minutes of the lecture, Seckel demonstrated many examples of illustrations …show more content…
Many of these violations we also learned from “perceptual constancy”. Perceptual constancy defines as the process by which we perceive stimuli consistently across varied conditions. In other words, it is the tendency of seeing familiar objects, shapes, sizes, colours etc. Due to perceptual constancy, we as humans are able to familiarize things, which in turns concludes any illustration that may have been shown to us by Seckel. An illustration shown by Seckel was Matheau Haemacker’s Cube, which violates our expectations about shape. In the textbook, perceptual constancy was mentioned, where “shape constancy” makes you realize that the item, will be that item, no matter what changes it. The textbook summarized shape constancy, which defines as where the figure you are familiarized with will always be that figure, even though after switching or moving it around, the shape will be the same to you. During this demonstration, it seems that the “cube” turned into a completely abstract figure, whereas we thought it was just a cube-shaped figure, which was clearly stated from the textbook, with physical demonstrations. Both of these points are overlapping, however, it benefits me because I now understand these terms from two points of views, Seckel, and the