Our eyes make us see different things

Why do we see different things?

The way our eyes work is one big reason why people see different things as obvious,  and therefore see other people as either fools or slaves of evil. 

Here's ten examples:

1)   We see different things in the "same picture"

 Here's one classic test case.  Is this a duck, facing to the left, or a rabbit, facing to the right?

Well,  the answer is "It's both."  But while your eyes can shift back and forth between seeing the rabbit or the duck, you cannot see both at once.    But once you pick an answer, it tends to latch in place. After you make a choice, you find all sorts of reasons that confirm your choice.   Or maybe you stop hanging around with people who see something different.   Once your choice becomes "obvious",   it becomes "clear" that other people must be idiots not to see such an "obvious" thing.

The internet was torn apart a few months ago over arguments on the "obvious" color of a dress and a pair of sneakers.

 2)  "Marilyn Einstein"  - A totally separate way two people disagree on what they see.

( this is an example of a "hybrid image". If you are close to the picture you see Albert Einstein . If you cross the room and look back at it, you see Marilyn Monroe. ) 

 

3)  Your eyes adjust for context and you cannot stop them.

Which square is darker - A or B?

Answer - the squares are exactly the same shade of gray.  To see that you can print out

the picture and cut out one square and slide it over to next to the other square.

 https://www.moillusions.com/colored-squares-illusion/#:~:text=Colored%20Squares%20Illusion%20The%20squares%20marked%20A%20and,becomes%20apparent%20that%20both%20squares%20are%20the%20same.

4)  Another effect of context you cannot stop:  Which line is longer?

( the Muller-Lyer Illusion)

 

Answer - you guessed it -- they are the same length.

 

 5)  Three lines now and your eyes help you to conform:

 

The line that you see as the same depends on how many people around you picked that line before you get to choose. 

This is a very strong effect and people literally swore that their choice was what they themselves saw and that they were not affected by peer pressure.

 (see https://practicalpie.com/asch-line-study/  )

6) The spinning Dancer. Which way is the young lady spinning?

(  People split on which way she is spinning. It's very hard to change.) 

https://www.artofplay.com/blogs/articles/fun-with-ambiguous-images

7) We see things that aren't really there.   

There are no triangles in this

picture but most people see two of them anyway.

( reference: https://www.verywellmind.com/cool-optical-illusions-2795841 )

 

8)  We see a moving green dot that's not there.

( The Lilac Chaser illusion )

https://michaelbach.de/ot/col-lilacChaser/index.html

 

 

9)  We DON'T see things that ARE there even when we are very very careful.

How Many F's?

Go to the following page and follow the instructions carefully. See how good your powers of observation are.

https://www.smart-jokes.org/count-number-f-sentence.html#:~:text=Count%20the%20number%20of%20%22F%22s%20in%20the%20following,SCIENTIFIC%20STUDY%20COMBINED%20WITH%20THE%20EXPERIENCE%20OF%20YEARS.

10)  Another fun test of your vision. How well can you avoid being distracted?

 Count the times the ball is passed between players wearing white

in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo&t=55s

 

Comment -- in many ways our eyes tell us what we want them to tell us, 

and our beliefs about what we "should" see change what we "do" see.

This is why experiments in science often need to be "double-blinded."

In my own hospital study experience we had a pathologist "read" a hundred slides to see if the tissue on the slide was cancer or not, with slides from a mix of treated and untreated patients.     We got a strong effect of the treatment and were about to publish that when someone realized the numeric codes on the slides gave away whether the slide was from someone treated or a control untreated group. 

After a long and heated discussion we decided to throw out a month's work,  relabel the slides with random numbers, and redo the experiment. The same pathologist read the same slides.    The impressive effect of treatment "went away" entirely.

Moral of the story -- "some things you have to believe to see."

 

#11  What color is THE DRESS???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

#12 )   How accurate is "eye-witness" testimony??

( Once "memory" of what a person DID SEE is involved,  everything is up for grabs.)

Nice short video. How good are YOUR eyes? :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChgPk2OiZCw&t=40s

https://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html

Many people believe that memory works something like a videotape.  Storing information is like recording and remembering is like playing back what was recorded.  With information being retrieved in much the same form as it was encoded.

However, memory does not work in this way.  It is a feature of human memory that we do not store information exactly as it is presented to us.  Rather, people extract from information the gist, or underlying meaning.

In other words, people store information in the way that makes the most sense to them.  We make sense of information by trying to fit it into schemas, which are a way of organizing information.

Schemas are mental 'units' of knowledge that correspond to frequently encountered people, objects or situations.  They allow us to make sense of what we encounter in order that we can predict what is going to happen and what we should do in any given situation.  These schemas may, in part, be determined by social values and therefore prejudice.

Schemas are therefore capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously ‘unacceptable’ information in order to ‘fit in’ with our existing knowledge or schemas.  This can, therefore, result in unreliable eyewitness testimony.

#13)  Police actually "SEE" innocent objects to be weapons more often if held by an African-Amercan male -- the tragedy of implicit bias

Why police so often see unarmed black men as threats

 

Extensive research on the subject shows that just about everyone carries this subconscious prejudice, known as implicit bias, no matter how well-meaning they might be. In the criminal justice system, this implicit bias may contribute to the many racial disparities in law enforcement. When it comes to police officers, implicit bias is a widespread concern, precisely because of how devastating its effects can be, with trade publications and federal programs taking steps to address it through training and awareness.

There are law enforcement officials who understand how devastating the effects of implicit bias can be, but no one understands this more than the people living in communities where racial minorities are disproportionately targeted by police and arrested. The reaction to police killings since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — most recently, the police shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma — is about more than a specific individual incident; it's also about the overall system that makes such deaths at the hands of police disproportionately common.

 #13)  How much is people's perception and thinking about what is "obvious" influenced by subconscious clues nearby or earlier in the day?

( Behavioral Science results from Professor Richard Thaler.  I was a teaching assistant for him for one executive education class one summer and we did this experiment! )

"Anchoring and Adjustment"

"A cognitive heuristic that influences how people assess probabilities in an intuitive manner"

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/anchoring-and-adjustment/

Quoting from that site:  Experiments

In one experiment, visitors to the San Francisco Exploratorium were asked two sets of questions about the height of the tallest redwood tree. The questions were:

1. Is the highest redwood tree taller or shorter than 1,200 feet?
2. What is your guess about the height of the tallest redwood?

The other set of questions were the same, but the anchor was 180 feet.

1. Is the highest redwood tree taller or shorter than 180 feet?
2. What is your guess about the height of the tallest redwood?

The result of the experiment above illustrated the anchoring effect. The visitors who were given the 1,200 feet anchor guessed, on average, the height to be 844 feet. On the other hand, those given the 180 feet anchor produced an average estimate of 282 feet.

#14 )  Despite being wrong so often, most of us still over-estimate the accuracy of what we think is true

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-art-thinking-clearly/201306/the-overconfidence-effect

 

My favorite musician, Johann Sebastian Bach, was anything but a one-hit wonder. He composed numerous works. How many there were I will reveal at the end of this blog post. But for now, here’s a small assignment: How many concertos do you think Bach composed? Choose a range, for example, between one hundred and five hundred, so that your estimate is at least 98 percent correct and only 2 percent off. [1] Write it on a piece of paper before you read on. Please do the same with these two questions: How many member states does OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) have? How long is the Nile river? Of course, you could choose your range from zero to infinity, but that would defeat the purpose of this little exercise. Just pick a large enough range for your to feel comfortable.

How much confidence should we have in our own knowledge? Psychologists Howard Raiffa and Marc Alpert, wondering the same thing, have interviewed hundreds of people in this way. Sometimes they have asked participants to estimate the total egg production in the United States or the number of physicians and surgeons listed in the Yellow Pages of the phone directory for Boston or the number of foreign automobiles imported into the United States, or even the toll collections of the Panama Canal in millions of dollars. Subjects could choose any range they liked, with the aim of being no more than 2 percent off. The results were amazing. In the final tally, instead of just 2 percent of the respondents being wrong, 40 percent proved incorrect. The researchers dubbed this amazing phenomenon the overconfidence effect.

The overconfidence effect also applies to forecasts, such as stock market performance over a year or your firm’s profits over three years. We systematically overestimate our knowledge and our ability to predict—on a massive scale. The overconfidence effect does not deal with whether single estimates are correct or not. Rather, it measures the difference between what people really know and what they think they know (see The Black Swan, Taleb). What’s surprising is this: Experts suffer even more from the overconfidence effect than laypeople do. If asked to forecast oil prices in five years’ time, an economics professor will be as wide of the mark as a zookeeper will. However, the professor will offer his forecast with certitude.

 

#15)  And because our ability to judge ourselves goes down faster than our ability,  many people seriously perceive themselves to be much more accurate and competent than they are.    This is why drunk people think they are much more capable of driving safely than others, until the next morning when they are shown a video of how they were in fact walking and driving the prior night when they were arrested.

But some people are mistakenly self-confident all the time.   Particularly if they suffer from narcissism.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-dont-stupid-people-realize-theyre-stupid-2012-7

"Simply put: stupid people are too stupid to realize they're stupid"

That is known as The Dunning–Kruger Effect 

 https://www.ponderweasel.com/the-dunning-kruger-effect-do-stupid-people-know-that-they-are-stupid/

 

Peter Drucker, the management consultant notes that the flip side is true too.  Many very competent people put up with being under-employed because they are so competent they don't realize that what they are doing is hard for other people. 

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SO, if I can't trust my own eyes and judgment, how do I not just sit and cry?

Well, one thing is to check with someone else to see if they see what you see.

This is built in.  Look at the first thing these infants do when surprised by

daddy playing the guitar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VhSwbQ1rk0

or won't we be paralyzed waiting for an "AUTHORITY FIGURE"

to confirm what we think/

But some people, especially Westerners,  experience so much anxiety

or panic on realizing they may be wrong that they can't stand it.

Asian cultures are more comfortable with Yin/Yang,  built in conflicts,

without panicking, and that lets them more easily survive ambiguity

and discomfort and therefore learn new things.

 

 Uncertainty as to the validity of your own opinion can be used against you

by con artists to get you to let of of judgment entirely.  MOre on that in a different

blog post.