The Importance of Distance in Art and Video Games

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

All works of art are optical illusions representing not what's out there but what happens inside your brain when you interact with the real world. We don't receive distance information via our senses we assume it based on associations that we have correlated with distance in the past. Our broadly similar brains decode those lines in painted pixels to create an illusion of distance where there is none. There are other images images called by stable perceptions that the brain decos into one of two possible subjective experiences and since it can't decide which one is the right one the most useful one the most accurate one it switches back and forth seemingly at random.

When facing a novel and uncertain situation, the brain secretly disambiguates the ambiguous without letting you know it was ever uncertain in the first place, leading people who disambiguate differently to seem iNsAnE.

This episode is about why we so often don't understand why we disagree, which leads us to disagree even more, and we explore that through the science behind The Dress. We look into why some people see it as black and blue, others see it as white and gold, and how the scientific investigation of why that is led to the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs, and how the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs may be, as one researcher explains, the nuclear bomb of cognitive neuroscience.

- Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com

- Become a patron at: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart