Blog Post #3 - Part 1

Seeing More Than Your Eye Does: Does your brain make up stories? (a "blindspot" experiment)

• In this activity I had to stare at a plus sign with only my right eye open. As I moved closer to the screen a black dot, which was positioned slightly right of the plus sign, would disappear and then reappear as I moved even closer. Other experiments put a black line through the dot. When the dot would dissapear you would still see a full line segment instead of simple a white patch where you are "blind."
• By doing this activity I learned that people have a blind spot! I thought this was very interesting. I greatly enjoyed doing the activity. I cannot think of any real life (every day) applications of our blind spot except for the mere purpose of having this knowledge, but it does give me a better realization of how some things happen (read final 2 lines in paragraph). I also learned that our mind either makes up things it cannot see, or it simply ignores it. This experiment gives me the interpretation that our minds are not always literal. What we see is not always what we actually see (example: halousinations and mirages).
• I was very surprised to learn that we have blind spots. The topic never really occured to me because when we look with both eyes the blind spot is not present. This is because the blindspot in one eye is seen by the other. Even when we close one eye, we are usually concentrating on something directly in front of us, while the blindspot occurs in our prepheral vision.

The Free Will Problem: Can you control what you do? (an experiment with ambiguous figures)

• In this activity I had to look at a picture that had arrows pointing in two directions. First I had to decide which arrows I wanted to look at. Then once I actually "saw" those arrows compared to the other ones I had to push a button.
• In this activity I learned that even though an individual has their own free will, they can still be "persuaded" to think differently. When an individual looks at a picture as I did in the activity, one side of the brain processes what you actually see and what pops out more to you. It takes your other side of the brain more time to process what part you actually want to look at. Even though I already knew about persuation, I now look at it in another light: visual persuation. This can be used in real life when creating posters or ads to try to persuade and catch an individuals attention.
• I was not overly surprised by the experiment. Though I do find it interesting how our "free will" takes more time to process what we want, than what we actually percieve.