Optical illusions show how we see | Beau Lotto
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- čas přidán 7. 10. 2009
- www.ted.com Beau Lotto's color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can't normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what's really out there.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10
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Beau's appearances in Brain Games opened my eyes to perceptual psychology. Such an amazing field of study.
I'm blind, did I miss anything?
"The brain didn't actually evolve to see the world as it is. Instead it evolved to see the world as it was useful to see in the past." Fascinating and profound.
Blue: "Have a nice day!"
Orange: "Thanks! You look wonderful, by the way!"
COMPLIMENTARY COLORS
I'm stealing this.
that guys shirt in unbuttoned to a disturbing degree
+liteRunner10 I was gonna say, I wonder if he could do up a couple of those buttons xD
+liteRunner10 Just... one more button... one more.... please -_-
+liteRunner10 Robinson Crusoe
I really didn't notice that :)
But then I usually do not care what people are wearing.
Yeah, that took me out of this a little bit.
The desert experiment around 6:30 had the opposite effect on me. My brain switched the red and green and I saw the left half as red and the right half as green. Weird, eh? Anyone else experiencing this?
Me too
I was just about to comment this. That's so weird.
***** that's not what the lector said. he said exactly the opposite. I'm supposed to see the left as green and the right as red, not the other way around.
*****
No he didn't, I just relistened to check and I would really like you to tell me where because I heard no such thing.
He said the right is under red illumination and the green is under green illumination. That's all he said, and it makes sense if you read the post of the guy above you.
Valencys exactly. and the opposite is happening to me. for me it the LEFT one is under RED and the RIGHT one is under GREEN. question is: why?
at first i thought he ment position of the dots
haha me too
Same
Same
In which case the answer would still have been grey
Yeah, he didn't make that clear AT all.
This whole thing felt like he woke up 15 mins ago and realized he had a Ted talk
2019 cheeyaaaa,
I legit thought you meant the positions of the colours, if anyone did, did you also pick the right bottom corner grey circle?
Yeah, paused the video
picked out the dot
thought about it
pressed play...
got disappointed and went to the comment section.
It is my understanding that the reason you see the two identical desert scenes as two different shades after looking at the red and green sides is that the cone cells in the eyes have not had time to recover. Typically humans have three types of cones for the three primary colours of light, red green and blue, and therefore three different forms of iodopsin (some have more, some have fewer). The relative levels of iodopsin stimulation results in the subtleties and gradations of colour we see. Iodopsin takes a little time to reform, and when the eye is subjected to the same colour for an extended period of time there is no chance to do that and a greater percentage of iodopsin is stimulated, which results in a sort of plasma burn-in of the eye, where the signal is not being sent even when the colour is present. In this case, the cells where the green and red light were focused while looking at the screen have momentarily lost the ability to see green and red as fully as usual, hence the right hand side looks less red and the left looks less green. I would class this effect as occurring in the eyes and not the brain "learning" as this guy claims, but others may disagree.
+James Hitchen Well, on that particular example, you're probably right. I had quite an afterimage after staring at the red and green. But (see wikipedia):
Newer evidence suggests there is cortical contribution as well.
I'd agree, the eyes were overwhelmed and then undercompensated afterward which is why the colors flipped. (Could no longer perceive red on the right and saw green)
I disagree. The brain calibrates itself in all kinds of ways not just visual... I once spent an hour bleaching a bathroom... after a while I could no longer smell bleach as my brain calibrated but when I went outside the fresh air smelt pungent and took a while to smell normal - the brain adjusted itself for the bleach and then had to adjust back for the fresh air. There are so many ways the brain does this in fact it is doing it all the time and we don't notice. Let's take music for example... a song has a melody and a chorus... the song needs the melody to make the chorus stand out... suspense and release in music and movies - the more suspense there is the bigger the action is when it happens as the brain calibrates down... someone who always wants more will always want more no matter what they get because the brain calibrates itself to still want more once the new level is achieved... Bad news... if there has been no bad news for a long while then when some bad news comes it's really a shock... if there is a lot of bad news then the brain calibrates itself until something really bad happens... this is why things appear cyclical often they are not but our brains perceive it that way.... There are lots of other examples but I need to finish my dinner :-)
Makes sense how the brain calibrates itself. I went shooting this one time and the smell of gunpowder the whole time overpowered everything else
Later, I passed gas in the truck and what do you know....smelled just like the gunpowder from earlier...a nice change actually.
James Hitchen So what does it mean if I dont see any difference between those pictures?
What I think is the most amazing property of colour vision, which he just touched on indirectly, is that we can perceive the colour of objects more-or-less correctly independent of the colour (temperature) of the incident light, by the average colour context. Look at a flower outside in the sun: colour temperature 6500 K. Take it indoors, look at it under an old-fashioned incandescent light, colour temp 2400 K: it will appear the same colour! Not to the camera, unless you adjust it (or unless it's a very sophisticated one). Scientific American covered this in the 60s, when the research was new; I'm still amazed by it.
The grey one was not in the same place on both boards, I thought that was what he meant.
+Chris Dealny Yeah me too.
Same.
Same here, Chris Dealny. I was solving the wrong puzzle.
Me too
Same here...
I SEE THE CAMERAMAN ON STAGE!!!! Was that part of the illusion?
Oh, isn't this great! A video on optical illusions in 480p. Congratulations, TED!
As you may have noticed, it was the year 2009. We didn't know what HD was back then, sorry.
very useful talk. I'd seen most of those before but one tends to forget that we don't see what is. We see what's useful.
very similar concepts i have been coming across just working with vintage/retro computer graphics, cubic colour palettes, colour opposites and dithering etc
Did someone else see the colors inverted? Green on the right desert and red on the left?
+Mc Kokas I did, idk if thats normal or not lol
+Sarah I believe you have "inverted vision". Our right eye works as our left and the left one works as our right. If you scroll down the comment section, we'll see that someone talked about this.
+Mc Kokas me too :S when he said green on left and red on right i was like ¨wtf i'm inverted¨ what could that be?
Badi I don't know for sure, but its nothing for you to worry about! :)
+Mc Kokas i may be wrong, i did not get to watch the video fully, but my guess would be your brain saying, oh your right eye has too much red so the red-detecting photoreceptor beomes tired (so u do not see the red anymore in the pic, so it looks green) and vice versa
I think the illusion is here is that everyone is acting like they know so much when they weren't invited to a ted talk but he was. This guy is helping treat blindness, he might even cure it one day. He is very inspiring and doing some good in the world more than you guys can say for yourselves.
Interesting. I paint and do work using a lot of colors, and I had no problem in the first test. The grays still looked like a different shade, but the colors seemed obvious. I wonder if that's something that can be sorta trained into you.
I nailed that pic of the panther in the black and white...the even amount of space between the eyes and the glare off the eyes drew my attention to that spot not quite immediately..but within the first 3-5 seconds
conversion of light into sound is just amazing
He just needs to rock a thick Gold chain would've completed the outfit 😂
That whole time he never explained how he got his chest so smooth??
@@revelutionx12p hahah lol
this is an incredibly compelling Ted talk, and i'm curious as to why there were a reasonably high number of dislikes. (for anyone who can't see them, you can get the "Return youtube dislike" extension from Chrome or Firefox extension stores)
Context is everything - and so are buttons
"The brain didn't evolve to see the world the way that it is...It evolved to see the world in a way that is useful."
What an idiotic statement.
That is the kind of wardrobe you choose when you would much rather walk around naked like at home
I love this comment
She’s totally naked under those clothes!
The red and green sections started overlapping after a while staring at the upper dot. To put it another way, I would see a thin red vertical stripe move into the green sector, and then alternate to a thin green vertical stripe moving on to the red area. Definitely saw two different desert colours when commanded to look down though.
I'm not saying he's been tweaked & awake for a day or two -he just looks, sounds & acts like he has. SLOW DOWN please. I had to keep pausing or repeating certain bits to see what everyone else was seeing. FINALLY I played it at .75. WORKS!!
A POINTER would go a long way in directing viewers to exactly which bits objects he's referring to.
for some reason, i can't seem to see the difference between the desert scene
This is brilliant , I was blind to that perspective
I was blinded by the unbuttoned shirt...
super awsm- -lrarning language after cochlear implant or sounf transposition expts also involve sound pattern learning
the red and green desert scene flipped for me, twice!
This man is fascinating. What he will be able to accomplish in his work.
I used a color picker chrome extension on that last illusion and those colors are not the same. in the first sqaures the color was #CB7D77 and in the second squares it was #BC7A6B
ok but that wasn't the point of the illusion. You should have used your color picker to see see if the squares changed after he took off the frame
@@coolfuzzycats you're both wrong.
@Vilesentry But under a different light, they are both right!
@@MrKabDrivr nah, just me. Trust me, I'm a doctor.
At 8:00 pause the video and try to see the shadow of Rubic Cube and the check boxes attached to it. You will see the boxes inside the shadow moving. Amazing 😘🙌🙌
The last “illusion” is something artists use consciously. It is a form of contrast. (Not sure what it’s called in English though.) The outside colour makes the colour inside look slightly different, because colours get affected by the colours beside them. Just like with the light/dark contrast where a dark colour looks darker next to a bright colour and likewise. (I learned a little about this in like 6th grade or something, so I don’t really remember much...)
Simultaneous contrast, if you haven't figured out yet xD
@@justforfun2297 Why, thank you. I did, in fact, never find out the english term for it. XD
I'm still confused about the blue and yellow tiles being gray.
Yeah, that was the hardest one to "see right".
So I took a screenshot, copied them next to each other in Paint, and...
... they were both the same gray.
in nature...grey absorbs (so reflects) its surrounding light...this is how rabbits hide. Deer hide the same way.
This guy looks like he just got out of bed and came straight to this presentation
I like it
I am so doing that at my next presentation. I don't care if I get zero in that assessment.
@Bitwise Magick cool!
@Bitwise Magick his dress was an illusion
Good on him for being in casual dress. We all don't have to conform surely? Do people get offended so easily just by a man's shirt undone? What hope do we have if everything has to be so particular. I thought what he was speaking about was what was important but I'm a casual dresser 😂 please don't run me down for being a person with casual dress sense. 😬
Superb!!! Thank you.
I'm a sucker for watching these videos... Can't stop the video.
When I looked at the deserts, the left looked red, and the right one looked green.
"I leave you with this: Is my shirt really unbuttoned or is it just an illusion?"
This is such an underrated comment! XD
Abhishek Sanyal my app does not tally thumbs down, does yours?
@@HighestRank No, it doesn't in my case either. There are no thumbs downs. But I would want this comment to have more thumbs ups than it currently has
We had a TED talk in science camp. Delightful how i discovered another one of them by accident xD
I found this fascinating, and this Beau Lotto is so clear and concise in his explanations, and he's a great teacher - I can't believe some of you guys down there- who the f CARES how he buttons his goddam shirt??!?
7:18 That's the first time I've heard someone explanaining this optical illusion in an understandable way.
Agreed.
Fernando Batista completely agree
every time the camera turn to him, he unbutton one button
great display... thanks
There is a capacitive effect in the retinal cells, so they get 'charged' with the 'colour' (radiation frequency) of an object. The discharge rate of this capacitor is like a 'memory', so your eyes are temporarily remembering the light colour they are exposed to. When you charge them up with a certain colour, this gets translated into the next image you look at.
9:20 Maybe that's how the quatum world is being read... that's why we re still getting 2 answers at the same time!
Quantum mechanincs is exactly the case where our limited perception of the world (be it via our own senses or using machines, gauges etc.) is letting us down. And it's the same reason why we will never get past a certain line of understanding because we are always trying to understand using evidence which is dependant on that limitation.
@@dejffjed Exactly!!!.. but I believe that there shall come a time we'd grasp all those phenomena.
1:20 Stefan Sagmeister
Starting with the DESERT SCENE it's getting excellent. So I would just excuse you guys for being "nervous" in the beginning
The illusion and what not is interesting but I am more impressed with the technology that could scan and translate real time color to sound... I’m an artist and would love to use that technology!!!!
Still dont see the difference between the desert images
for me the image below the green square was red, and the image below the red square was green.
same
To Debajyoto Sengupta
Did you focus on the white spot for about 30 seconds. 10 seconds may not be enough.
Same here I tried a few times
Are you colour blind by chance?
Confusing....Also, button your shirt.
Lmfao😂😂😂
2009, that was the style
That's none of your business.😁😂
@@shreenikethanv6241 That's optical illusion. it is actually buttoned xD
If it was confusing, you should have paid less attention to his outfit
Thank you Beau !
at 6:20 is the bottom image supposed to reflect the color directly above it? Based on his explanation of what should happen, my perception was the opposite. The image under red looked green and under green it looked red.
Naked Chest: *Does card trick.
Audience: "Wow!"
Naked Chest: "Your whole life is a lie!"
Audience: *Applause
Thumper see: Scotty Kilmer’s book, ‘You’re Doing it All Wrong’.
This guy looks like he’s just been rescued off a deserted island.
lol
Maybe only partially successful rescue...
This reminds me of my color classes in art school.
Great!!!! Thank you!
The dress is blue and black. Period.
I saw blue and gold, and that isn't even an option :(
i'm so mad, i know it's fucking blue and black, but i see it gold and white, i'm screaming!!
***** I would high-five your mom right now if I could, my whole family sees white and brown?!
***** I think it is gold and blue too :D
CZÄR Njgagaga Same here, that's also the actual color in the particular photo if you check the rgb values.
This was very informative. I'm also colorblind and no, this wasn't fun but definitely informative.
Were these two videos related. Was the research that Lotto does helpful for the computers interpreting the optics from the cameras?
One of the best Ted talks I've seen
why did the left desert one look red for me if red was on the right, vice versa?
+Kayla Anderson i had the same. i was a bit confused too
Your brain perceives that left side as illuminated by green light and the right side as illuminated by red light and then adjusts the images to match that information
The colors only swapped like that because green and red are complimentary colors. If the squares were green and blue, the bottom would've looked red and orange because your mind would apply extra red to compensate for the excess green and orange to compensate for the excess blue.
By using green and red, your brain compensated with red and green, for a reason not dependent on the other side.
The brain has nothing to do with this. The red and green cones get overstimulated, making them less sensitive to those colors. If you look at the desert, the red cones fire less actively on the right scene, and the green ones less active on the left scene. It's the same thing when you look in bright light, and go into a dark room afterwards. You can't see because the rods are overstimulated.
Someone who is not affected with the desert experiment around 6:30 ?
@KLJF sweet
I was not affected at all, whatsoever, by that illusion. Never have been.
@@SniperLogic Did you figure out why?
Yes!! Super awesome!
does anyone know when Ted is going to talk?
The only concerning optical issue here is the amount of chest on display
Perhaps he's One of Them...
Lol at the start when everyone said grey but he said it was an even split
May Floydweather I noticed that too. 80% gray (which he said interesting) the rest of the colors were barely evenly split
retinal cells work on chemicals, when we see different colors and look at a different picture, it takes time to get the chemicals giving signals from the retina to the optic nerve to get neutralize and process new information to pass it to optic nerve, essentially we are superimposing photos like in camera over exposure is used to create fancy effects on images
Desert thing worked 4 me it was like ur TV on high definition and 1 set to warm colors and it's at 530 not 630
5:50
For me, the right one was green, and the left was red. Uh... what?
I don't know if the talker expressed himself properly but notice he says "the right one is still under red light" not that the right one should be red. What he might not have gotten across fully is that, when looking at something saturated in red light, you start seeing things as relative to that red. ie. You see the desert as less red (and, therefore more green) than the solid red that has become "your new normal." TL:DR Inverted is how it should be.
Yes, it's like white balancing. To a camera that makes (sorta) absolute measurements of the light coming into it a white piece of paper will look dramatically different under light sources of even slightly varying color temperatures, but your visual system compensates for that and try to show it to you as it would be under white light, making it look "white" to you. So even if you're under very warm (reddish) lighting, the piece of paper will look more or less white to you (it'll look less red than the lighting should make it), and vice versa for cool (blueish) lighting. So indeed if your brain expects the right side to be under red lighting, your visual system will compensate and make the image look less red, and as a result more greenish. Same for the left side, your visual system expects the scene to be under a green light, and compensates to what it would look like under a whiter light, making it look more reddish.
For me neither one existed as a desert because in my ecology there doesn’t exist red or green sand.
That unbuttoned shirt needed a medallion.
nice explanation
That's correct.. Would be amazing if You had experienced it the other way around.. When looking at the green/red fields, those colours are cancelled out by Your brain looking at the two deserets again, leaving the impression that You are seeing, or rather experiencing the sight of the pictures without that particular colour, Your brain sees it as red/green inbstead of green/red..
the benefit of this for visually impaired should be researched more. I hope we could in reality translate images to sound so the visually impaired can feel the world like any of us.
The visually impaired cannot "feel the world like any of us". You cannot "feel" the world like the visually impaired do either.
For the love of god, please just do up one more button! Two would be better!!
For some reason I knew that the comments would be about his shirt.
Amazing
you need to look at the bottom dot when you look down though .
just try it a few times , it will work .
"There is no inherent meaning in information."
Well that really depends on your definition of "meaning". You could be talking about pragmatic meaning, semantic meaning or semiotic meaning, each with different criteria.
Didnt you prove his point with your own example? :P
You might want to look up the meaning of "inherent". Perhaps you have, six years later, but it's worth trying. ;)
What poorly worded first question.
Tone's - 'Tones'. Speak for yourself
I agree! I was looking for dots with the same position
@@AbhishekSanyalTGV yeah same, I paused it for a while lol
Sterven Mealey I understood the incongruous logic immediately because it was useful to have done so in the past.
Ev. CW what *a poorly-worded first response.
What did I learn from this that will help me live a meaningful life.... nothing. And that is pretty much the result of every Ted talk I’ve ever watched.
I too am color blind, so of course many examples were lost, but not the conclusion. In fact, Beau Lotto should have included the perspective of a color blind person to make his point, in particular, how we apply his insights for one particular daily survival challenge, traffic lights. The green light looks white, and yet all of you are safe when we drive -- all because of his observations of how we learn to perceive what is useful.
Imagine what things exist that we can simply not sence.
"We can only see about 1% of our surroundings, of what's really there. If we took away everything we can see (matter we are able to perceive) like the stars, the galaxies, the light... universe would essentially remain the same. Everything we see is irrelevant for the functions of the universe."
- Lawrence Krauss
Plus: he also mentioned how scary this fact is
Here is another key : a bee will inform other bees when it found a nectar in an area. They love to share which is what human should learn from them. Sharing is caring my friend. Of course, not everything can be shared. For example, you can't share your wife with other men unless you are dead or got divorce with her and she wants to marry another man and that is not even called sharing but just a normal woman can do if her husband has died or she got divorced.
I love you. I don't know why, but I love you.
You could share your wife with other men even if you're not dead or divorced, you just don't want to.
It doesn't even have to be with other men for it to be sharing
OK, I hope someone can explain my result for the GREEN/RED DESERT example: I followed the direction but my colors were flipped. The desert on the right was in green and the desert on the left was in red. So an inverse of what was above it. Any ideas? Thanks! Would love to hear from someone, anyone, even though this is a ten year old video. Thanks!
The reason is that when you look at the colors, the right side of your visual field sees red and the left side sees green. What your brain does is subtract those colors from the scene, so you would be able to better detect any subtle details that were otherwise invisible. When you look at the desert, your left is still taking away green, and your right is still taking away red, and since green and red are opposites, you see red on your left and green on your right.
Colored dots?
Excuse me sir, but in 2019 we call them "dots of color!"
Stanley Lubarski no
LOL
@@jayt7178
*peej m* gets it.
All of his buttons are buttoned,,it’s one of his illusions
It's a half and half shirt- half buttons and half velcro. They just forgot the velcro.
best Ted yet.
This was mesmerizing!! And I cant remember the technical or its name, but kept thinking of a very rare condition/syndrome etc, were were people claim to be able to see sounds, or smell colors, see smells, etc? I cant remember what its called...or I may be just going crazy? Great video!
I think the word you're looking for is synaesthesia. :-)
his shirt is optical illusion too. it is actually buttoned xD
See you think his shirt is unbuttoned, in actuality, his fly is down.
🤣
Awesome!
Maybe it was because I wasn't physically looking at the "illusions" but they didn't seem to fool me when they were suppose to.
But his point is still well made.
Hopefully they make some sort of exhibit at a science museum so I can see if they actually trick my eyes.
that 6 year old child song was creepy
Why.... is his shirt unbuttoned so low?
Cuz he is a badass optical scientist.
That was AWESOME
1:10 I think that's logical because grey is not a color but only a balance between light and dark. It's the hardest to hide any difference in it, since the neurological (?) misleading effect that happens while looking at different real colors doesn't affect the sight of clean grey. Most people would see it instantly, what would destroy the challenge.