1 00:00:00 --> 00:00:01 2 00:00:01 --> 00:00:02 The following content is provided 3 00:00:02 --> 00:00:04 by MIT open courseware under a creative commons license. 4 00:00:04 --> 00:00:08 Additional information about our license, and MIT open 5 00:00:08 --> 00:00:15 courseware, in general, is available at ocw.mit.edu. 6 00:00:15 --> 00:00:17 PROFESSOR: Good afternoon. 7 00:00:17 --> 00:00:22 8 00:00:22 --> 00:00:31 In response to public demand here-- let's see how many 9 00:00:31 --> 00:00:34 people do you-- again, the colors may have faded by 10 00:00:34 --> 00:00:37 now, but check it when you tilt your head. 11 00:00:37 --> 00:00:38 The effect changes. 12 00:00:38 --> 00:00:44 13 00:00:44 --> 00:00:48 How many people still have some sort of an effect? 14 00:00:48 --> 00:00:51 It's really nice to know that this course has some 15 00:00:51 --> 00:00:53 lasting impact on people. 16 00:00:53 --> 00:01:00 17 00:01:00 --> 00:01:08 Maybe we should try posting the Powerpoint on the web, because 18 00:01:08 --> 00:01:10 then if you want to build up your own McCullough effect 19 00:01:10 --> 00:01:14 you can do this and entertain yourselves. 20 00:01:14 --> 00:01:18 21 00:01:18 --> 00:01:24 If you have been following the story thus far, you should 22 00:01:24 --> 00:01:32 basically have the idea that at the front of the visual system, 23 00:01:32 --> 00:01:39 or of any sensory system, you've got all sorts of 24 00:01:39 --> 00:01:41 information coming in. 25 00:01:41 --> 00:01:46 That the job early processes in the visual systems do. 26 00:01:46 --> 00:01:49 The sorts of things that the early parts of visual cortex do 27 00:01:49 --> 00:01:53 and say, oh look, there's a little line at this point 28 00:01:53 --> 00:01:54 in the visual field. 29 00:01:54 --> 00:01:58 Oh look, there's a dot there, and a line here, 30 00:01:58 --> 00:02:00 and it's moving like that. 31 00:02:00 --> 00:02:03 Little bits of information all over the place. 32 00:02:03 --> 00:02:06 Too much of it for you to handle. 33 00:02:06 --> 00:02:11 So, last time I talked about this bottleneck of attention 34 00:02:11 --> 00:02:17 that allows only some of it through to processes that 35 00:02:17 --> 00:02:21 would do things like, say, recognition. 36 00:02:21 --> 00:02:24 And, then, I'm going to run out of places to draw. 37 00:02:24 --> 00:02:26 We'll take a little detour here. 38 00:02:26 --> 00:02:32 Somewhere up here, you're going to get perception. 39 00:02:32 --> 00:02:38 And the job of today's lecture is to convince you that that 40 00:02:38 --> 00:02:42 percept, your current understanding of the world, 41 00:02:42 --> 00:02:46 is always the result of many, many inferences. 42 00:02:46 --> 00:02:52 Many, many guesses of what the nature of the world might be. 43 00:02:52 --> 00:02:59 Because, not only is there too much information coming in, 44 00:02:59 --> 00:03:03 there's also too little information coming to specify 45 00:03:03 --> 00:03:06 exactly what's going on out there in the world. 46 00:03:06 --> 00:03:08 Consider just a couple of the problems -- I think 47 00:03:08 --> 00:03:10 are they on the hand out? 48 00:03:10 --> 00:03:12 Couple of them are-- well, one of the obvious ones. 49 00:03:12 --> 00:03:15 It's the world is 3D. 50 00:03:15 --> 00:03:17 Your job is to figure out what's going on 51 00:03:17 --> 00:03:18 out in the world. 52 00:03:18 --> 00:03:20 The input is inherently 2D. 53 00:03:20 --> 00:03:25 That retina that you've got is a 2D surface. 54 00:03:25 --> 00:03:28 So, if you are seeing 3D, you are recovering that 55 00:03:28 --> 00:03:34 3D information from essentially 2D input. 56 00:03:34 --> 00:03:40 You're collecting information about light intensities. 57 00:03:40 --> 00:03:42 You don't care about light intensity. 58 00:03:42 --> 00:03:46 You care about surface properties in the world. 59 00:03:46 --> 00:03:49 So, everything patch that you're seeing -- if you're 60 00:03:49 --> 00:03:57 looking at this spot right here, what you're seeing is the 61 00:03:57 --> 00:04:03 product of the surface, the properties of the surface, and 62 00:04:03 --> 00:04:05 the properties of the illuminant, the properties of 63 00:04:05 --> 00:04:07 what's lighting it up. 64 00:04:07 --> 00:04:09 You don't care about the properties of the illuminate. 65 00:04:09 --> 00:04:15 You want to recover just the properties of the surface. 66 00:04:15 --> 00:04:18 So how do you successfully ignore the properties 67 00:04:18 --> 00:04:18 of illumination? 68 00:04:18 --> 00:04:21 We'll say a little bit about that. 69 00:04:21 --> 00:04:25 The world you're looking is an essentially stable world. 70 00:04:25 --> 00:04:27 I mean things move around in it, but the whole world 71 00:04:27 --> 00:04:28 doesn't jump around. 72 00:04:28 --> 00:04:32 But, you're looking at it from an inherently 73 00:04:32 --> 00:04:34 unstable vantage point. 74 00:04:34 --> 00:04:35 You're moving around. 75 00:04:35 --> 00:04:38 And more to the point, even if you're salk still, the way 76 00:04:38 --> 00:04:42 you're looking at the world is you're moving your eyes around. 77 00:04:42 --> 00:04:44 Try this for a moment. 78 00:04:44 --> 00:04:46 Look at the lower left hand corner of the screen. 79 00:04:46 --> 00:04:49 80 00:04:49 --> 00:04:51 Well, actually that might be a little large, so look at the 81 00:04:51 --> 00:04:54 lower left hand corner this McCollough test pattern. 82 00:04:54 --> 00:04:56 Look at the lower right hand corner of the McCollough 83 00:04:56 --> 00:04:58 test pattern. 84 00:04:58 --> 00:05:03 Did the McCollough effect test pattern jump when you did that? 85 00:05:03 --> 00:05:04 No. 86 00:05:04 --> 00:05:05 It didn't. 87 00:05:05 --> 00:05:06 Why didn't it jump? 88 00:05:06 --> 00:05:10 Because when you're looking here-- do I have a 89 00:05:10 --> 00:05:12 laser pointer today? 90 00:05:12 --> 00:05:12 No. 91 00:05:12 --> 00:05:17 Oh well -- when you're looking here, the bulk of that square 92 00:05:17 --> 00:05:19 is to the right of fixation. 93 00:05:19 --> 00:05:21 When you're looking here, the bulk that image is to 94 00:05:21 --> 00:05:22 the left the fixation. 95 00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 So it's in two different spots on the retina. 96 00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 If I put something here, and something here, on your retina, 97 00:05:27 --> 00:05:28 it'll look like it's moving. 98 00:05:28 --> 00:05:31 Why didn't that look like it's moving? 99 00:05:31 --> 00:05:36 The reason is, that when you tell your eyes to move, you 100 00:05:36 --> 00:05:43 send a copy of that command, in effect, to visual centers of 101 00:05:43 --> 00:05:48 your brain saying, look, I just told my eyes to move, kindly 102 00:05:48 --> 00:05:52 ignore the resulting smear. 103 00:05:52 --> 00:05:54 In fact, I want you to do two things. 104 00:05:54 --> 00:06:00 I want you-- you, your visual system-- I want you to shut 105 00:06:00 --> 00:06:06 down during the course of the eye movement, and I want you to 106 00:06:06 --> 00:06:10 compensate for the fact that everything is been displaced. 107 00:06:10 --> 00:06:13 You can see what would happen if that was not the case, 108 00:06:13 --> 00:06:17 by taking your finger, and poking your eye. 109 00:06:17 --> 00:06:20 110 00:06:20 --> 00:06:24 On your eyelid, you should try this, because it's more 111 00:06:24 --> 00:06:26 interesting if you actually try this, it if you 112 00:06:26 --> 00:06:27 wiggle your eyeball. 113 00:06:27 --> 00:06:30 You can do it slowly, or you can do it quickly. 114 00:06:30 --> 00:06:32 Look at me, and poke your eye ball around. 115 00:06:32 --> 00:06:37 You will notice that all your friends look funny. 116 00:06:37 --> 00:06:40 But, you'll notice that things are jumping around. 117 00:06:40 --> 00:06:41 Why is that? 118 00:06:41 --> 00:06:44 Well look. 119 00:06:44 --> 00:06:47 Millions of years of evolution did not provide you with a 120 00:06:47 --> 00:06:52 mechanism that said, I am now going to poke my eye. 121 00:06:52 --> 00:06:56 Please send a copy of that signal to the visual centers 122 00:06:56 --> 00:06:57 of the brain, saying to cancel that out. 123 00:06:57 --> 00:06:59 There's no cancellation signal here. 124 00:06:59 --> 00:07:02 And so, you see the image moving around. 125 00:07:02 --> 00:07:06 You don't see the image moving around when you move your eyes 126 00:07:06 --> 00:07:10 normally, because you're compensating for it. 127 00:07:10 --> 00:07:13 All right, so you're collecting all this information. 128 00:07:13 --> 00:07:17 You're doing your best to register it in a 129 00:07:17 --> 00:07:19 stable kind of a way. 130 00:07:19 --> 00:07:19 Oh look at that. 131 00:07:19 --> 00:07:21 It also says I'm going to demonstrate the vestibular 132 00:07:21 --> 00:07:22 ocular reflex. 133 00:07:22 --> 00:07:25 134 00:07:25 --> 00:07:29 Let me do that, just because you might as well get to use 135 00:07:29 --> 00:07:32 your fingers some more. 136 00:07:32 --> 00:07:35 You also want the world not to jump around too much when 137 00:07:35 --> 00:07:36 you're moving your head. 138 00:07:36 --> 00:07:41 One of the things you do very reflexively is, if you rotate 139 00:07:41 --> 00:07:43 you take your head one way, your eyes counter 140 00:07:43 --> 00:07:44 rotate the other. 141 00:07:44 --> 00:07:47 That's a very quick reflex. 142 00:07:47 --> 00:07:49 If you want to see how quick it is, try this. 143 00:07:49 --> 00:07:51 Hold your finger out in front of you. 144 00:07:51 --> 00:07:55 Look at your finger, and move your head back and forth, and 145 00:07:55 --> 00:07:58 just keep your eyes on the finger. 146 00:07:58 --> 00:08:01 No problem, right? 147 00:08:01 --> 00:08:02 You know you can do that. 148 00:08:02 --> 00:08:05 Now, at the same speed, move your fingers, and try to keep 149 00:08:05 --> 00:08:07 your eye on the finger. 150 00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 Can't do it. 151 00:08:10 --> 00:08:16 It doesn't work, because that tracking movement -- there 152 00:08:16 --> 00:08:17 are more neurons involved. 153 00:08:17 --> 00:08:20 It's a slower process. 154 00:08:20 --> 00:08:25 The vestibular ocular reflect is a very short latency kind 155 00:08:25 --> 00:08:29 of a reflex designed to keep the input relatively stable. 156 00:08:29 --> 00:08:32 So, you take all that lovely input in, you got all these 157 00:08:32 --> 00:08:35 little bits information all over the place, and then you've 158 00:08:35 --> 00:08:39 gotta make your best guess about what it is that 159 00:08:39 --> 00:08:40 you're looking at. 160 00:08:40 --> 00:08:42 The reason that this is an interesting picture, it's in 161 00:08:42 --> 00:08:45 the book, by the way, so when you can't see here, you can go 162 00:08:45 --> 00:08:48 and study it in the book, until you can see the dalmatian 163 00:08:48 --> 00:08:50 dog that really is there. 164 00:08:50 --> 00:08:52 How many people can see it now? 165 00:08:52 --> 00:08:55 Oh, we got most of them. 166 00:08:55 --> 00:08:59 His head is right above my finger, front paws, back paws. 167 00:08:59 --> 00:09:05 He's on a road sloping from lower left to upper right. 168 00:09:05 --> 00:09:11 The point of a picture like this, is that it's slows down 169 00:09:11 --> 00:09:14 the process of inference enough, that you can sort 170 00:09:14 --> 00:09:15 of feel it happened. 171 00:09:15 --> 00:09:20 Normally, when I look out at you, for instance, my visual 172 00:09:20 --> 00:09:24 system kicks up one, and only one, interpretation of what I'm 173 00:09:24 --> 00:09:27 looking at, so rapidly, that I never notice all the 174 00:09:27 --> 00:09:29 work that's involved. 175 00:09:29 --> 00:09:32 The purpose of this picture, and really the purpose of this 176 00:09:32 --> 00:09:36 lecture, is to show some of the work that's involved. 177 00:09:36 --> 00:09:41 So what you've got here is a bunch of isolated little 178 00:09:41 --> 00:09:44 black and white regions. 179 00:09:44 --> 00:09:47 In order to figure out what's going on here, you've got to 180 00:09:47 --> 00:09:50 decide who goes together. 181 00:09:50 --> 00:09:51 How are we going to decide who goes together? 182 00:09:51 --> 00:09:53 Well lets think of this in the context of a bunch 183 00:09:53 --> 00:09:55 of little line segments. 184 00:09:55 --> 00:09:58 185 00:09:58 --> 00:10:01 You can, sort of, decide that some of these guys might go 186 00:10:01 --> 00:10:03 with some of the other ones but what I'm going to do, is 187 00:10:03 --> 00:10:08 rotate all of them by 90 degrees, if I recall. 188 00:10:08 --> 00:10:09 No. 189 00:10:09 --> 00:10:10 Maybe some other orientation. 190 00:10:10 --> 00:10:15 But anyway, now they are the same lines on the screen, but 191 00:10:15 --> 00:10:18 now some of them hang together, right? 192 00:10:18 --> 00:10:22 Got that sort of potato shape thing there. 193 00:10:22 --> 00:10:23 Why? 194 00:10:23 --> 00:10:26 What makes these guys go along with each other now in a way 195 00:10:26 --> 00:10:27 that they didn't before? 196 00:10:27 --> 00:10:35 Well, if you're a little chunk of brain, whose job it is to 197 00:10:35 --> 00:10:38 figure out where contours are out in the world, what you're 198 00:10:38 --> 00:10:41 getting from earlier in the visual system, is word that 199 00:10:41 --> 00:10:43 there's a little bit of contour here, a little bit of a contour 200 00:10:43 --> 00:10:45 here, a little bit of a contour here. 201 00:10:45 --> 00:10:47 I wonder if those should go together? 202 00:10:47 --> 00:10:49 Now how do we decide that the little bits of contour 203 00:10:49 --> 00:10:51 might go together? 204 00:10:51 --> 00:10:53 Well, you might do something like this. 205 00:10:53 --> 00:11:00 206 00:11:00 --> 00:11:06 If you've got a line here, and you're asking what's the best 207 00:11:06 --> 00:11:15 bet about if this is really a piece of a continuing contour? 208 00:11:15 --> 00:11:17 Where's this likely to go next? 209 00:11:17 --> 00:11:20 Well, it might make a hair pin turn and go off that way. 210 00:11:20 --> 00:11:21 Doesn't seem really likely. 211 00:11:21 --> 00:11:27 More likely, it's going to go off in something like the 212 00:11:27 --> 00:11:28 direction that it's pointing. 213 00:11:28 --> 00:11:33 And that turns out to be the potato shaped ones. 214 00:11:33 --> 00:11:37 This is a very rule governed behavior. 215 00:11:37 --> 00:11:42 If you've got a bunch a little line segments, as long as the 216 00:11:42 --> 00:11:47 deviation here isn't more than about, as I recall, 30 degrees 217 00:11:47 --> 00:11:51 or so, from co-linear, you're willing to string those 218 00:11:51 --> 00:11:54 together pretty happily. 219 00:11:54 --> 00:11:57 If it starts to be more than, that your unlikely 220 00:11:57 --> 00:11:59 to string them together. 221 00:11:59 --> 00:12:02 The beginning of an effort to tie little pieces of 222 00:12:02 --> 00:12:08 information together into larger structures. 223 00:12:08 --> 00:12:09 All right, what do you see here? 224 00:12:09 --> 00:12:12 225 00:12:12 --> 00:12:13 Two lines crossing each other. 226 00:12:13 --> 00:12:17 A reasonable interpretation. 227 00:12:17 --> 00:12:19 Though, it's not the only possible interpretation 228 00:12:19 --> 00:12:20 of this. 229 00:12:20 --> 00:12:22 I mean, it could be something like this. 230 00:12:22 --> 00:12:27 Two birds kissing each other, or something like that. 231 00:12:27 --> 00:12:40 Why do you see and, in fact, this is something like that. 232 00:12:40 --> 00:12:43 And you see that as an x with two lines crossing each other, 233 00:12:43 --> 00:12:58 but if I provide enough other details here, it's a sea lion? 234 00:12:58 --> 00:12:59 I don't know what it is. 235 00:12:59 --> 00:13:02 236 00:13:02 --> 00:13:05 The point is, he's still a lousy artist. 237 00:13:05 --> 00:13:09 It hasn't gotten any better. 238 00:13:09 --> 00:13:10 The point is more or less the same. 239 00:13:10 --> 00:13:18 You've got this little process that's worrying about that 240 00:13:18 --> 00:13:25 little piece of line segment, gets to this junction, and is 241 00:13:25 --> 00:13:28 busy doing the three roads diversion of yellow wood 242 00:13:28 --> 00:13:31 kind of thing, trying to decide which way to go. 243 00:13:31 --> 00:13:36 And, it's guessing that all else being equal, I should 244 00:13:36 --> 00:13:37 probably go with that. 245 00:13:37 --> 00:13:47 246 00:13:47 --> 00:13:50 It sometimes goes by the name of good continuation. 247 00:13:50 --> 00:13:53 It's one of a variety of so- called grouping rules that were 248 00:13:53 --> 00:13:58 developed first by the Gestalt psychologists starting in the 249 00:13:58 --> 00:14:03 early part of the twentieth century, and they're really 250 00:14:03 --> 00:14:10 rules for figuring out how bits of the scene might 251 00:14:10 --> 00:14:12 hang together. 252 00:14:12 --> 00:14:17 You can see a similar sort of process going on here. 253 00:14:17 --> 00:14:19 You can see that as three isolated line segments, 254 00:14:19 --> 00:14:21 but you probably don't. 255 00:14:21 --> 00:14:26 You see that as a curvy lines that occluded, right? 256 00:14:26 --> 00:14:28 If I suddenly reveal this, you don't go, ooh. 257 00:14:28 --> 00:14:31 Amazing! 258 00:14:31 --> 00:14:33 Kind of what I thought was there. 259 00:14:33 --> 00:14:37 That's also highly rule governed. 260 00:14:37 --> 00:14:40 261 00:14:40 --> 00:14:50 If you've got a line segment and you've got another line 262 00:14:50 --> 00:14:54 segment, you're perfectly happy to see this one and 263 00:14:54 --> 00:14:56 this one is connected. 264 00:14:56 --> 00:14:59 265 00:14:59 --> 00:15:00 Well how about this. 266 00:15:00 --> 00:15:01 This will do. 267 00:15:01 --> 00:15:04 If I put one up here. 268 00:15:04 --> 00:15:06 All the more if I erase the stuff in between. 269 00:15:06 --> 00:15:11 270 00:15:11 --> 00:15:13 That, you're less likely to see as connected. 271 00:15:13 --> 00:15:16 Now why are you less likely to see that as connected? 272 00:15:16 --> 00:15:22 The rule turns out to be, that if I can connect two lines 273 00:15:22 --> 00:15:29 with a smooth curve, I'm in business. 274 00:15:29 --> 00:15:30 I'll be willing to see those as connected. 275 00:15:30 --> 00:15:33 But, if I have to put an inflection in it to make 276 00:15:33 --> 00:15:36 it work, then it doesn't look as convincing. 277 00:15:36 --> 00:15:39 I mean it's not that I deny the possibility this could ever 278 00:15:39 --> 00:15:48 connect with that, but if I give people a bunch of stimuli 279 00:15:48 --> 00:15:54 like this, and ask good connection or a bad connection? 280 00:15:54 --> 00:15:57 The good connections are the ones that can be done can 281 00:15:57 --> 00:15:58 with a single smooth curve. 282 00:15:58 --> 00:15:59 That can't quite. 283 00:15:59 --> 00:16:01 I think you probably have to get an inflection 284 00:16:01 --> 00:16:02 in there somewhere. 285 00:16:02 --> 00:16:07 And if you have to inflict the curve, it fails. 286 00:16:07 --> 00:16:13 People report it as looking less convincingly continuous. 287 00:16:13 --> 00:16:16 All right, it's voting times here. 288 00:16:16 --> 00:16:19 Here we've got a whole bunch isolated guys, but they do 289 00:16:19 --> 00:16:21 seem to have something to do with each other. 290 00:16:21 --> 00:16:26 If you had to pick, this being organized by columns or rows, 291 00:16:26 --> 00:16:28 how many vote for columns? 292 00:16:28 --> 00:16:31 How many vote for rows? 293 00:16:31 --> 00:16:33 Ain't much to chose, right? 294 00:16:33 --> 00:16:38 But, if I do this, OK, how many vote for columns? 295 00:16:38 --> 00:16:40 How many vote for rows? 296 00:16:40 --> 00:16:42 So, we've now skewed it very heavily in the 297 00:16:42 --> 00:16:44 direction of columns. 298 00:16:44 --> 00:16:46 And, all that I've done is change the 299 00:16:46 --> 00:16:49 proximity of elements. 300 00:16:49 --> 00:16:55 Once the distance from one item to the next item in a vertical 301 00:16:55 --> 00:16:59 direction is closer than to the items in the horizontal 302 00:16:59 --> 00:17:05 direction, it's another one just these gestalt grouping 303 00:17:05 --> 00:17:09 rules of proximity takes over, and says, well, all else being 304 00:17:09 --> 00:17:12 equal, if I had to guess who goes with who, the guys that 305 00:17:12 --> 00:17:13 are close to each other. 306 00:17:13 --> 00:17:17 They probably go with each other. 307 00:17:17 --> 00:17:21 Multiple rules operate at the same time, so I'll keep the 308 00:17:21 --> 00:17:24 proximity rule working here. 309 00:17:24 --> 00:17:28 Now, if you have to vote, how many vote for columns? 310 00:17:28 --> 00:17:30 How many votes for rows? 311 00:17:30 --> 00:17:34 So now, I've skewed it very heavily in the direction of 312 00:17:34 --> 00:17:39 rows, even though the proximity rule, is still 313 00:17:39 --> 00:17:40 going for columns. 314 00:17:40 --> 00:17:43 Those things are closer to each other in a vertical 315 00:17:43 --> 00:17:44 direction that horizontal. 316 00:17:44 --> 00:17:48 In this case, the similarity is trumping that. 317 00:17:48 --> 00:17:51 You can balance these off against each other. 318 00:17:51 --> 00:17:54 How similar to does it need to be to compensate for a two to 319 00:17:54 --> 00:17:59 one difference in distance for instance or something like 320 00:17:59 --> 00:18:01 that, but the important point here is, that what 321 00:18:01 --> 00:18:04 you're trying to do. 322 00:18:04 --> 00:18:07 These are, you know, demonstration versions of 323 00:18:07 --> 00:18:10 presumably what you're doing all the time. 324 00:18:10 --> 00:18:20 I'm looking out there, and I'm seeing regions of redness. 325 00:18:20 --> 00:18:24 I see sort of disconnected regions of redness, but 326 00:18:24 --> 00:18:26 I'm guessing, they're all part of her top. 327 00:18:26 --> 00:18:32 It's your top there. 328 00:18:32 --> 00:18:33 It's you. 329 00:18:33 --> 00:18:34 No, not her. 330 00:18:34 --> 00:18:36 That's pink, you're wearing. 331 00:18:36 --> 00:18:37 The woman behind you. 332 00:18:37 --> 00:18:40 Well, the woman next to you is also red. 333 00:18:40 --> 00:18:49 But, in this case, you can see the role of proximity here. 334 00:18:49 --> 00:18:51 So, the similarity thing is telling me, all those red 335 00:18:51 --> 00:18:53 things are tied together, and I'm making it into sort 336 00:18:53 --> 00:18:55 of one piece of clothing. 337 00:18:55 --> 00:19:00 The proximity thing is saying, well I don't think her red top, 338 00:19:00 --> 00:19:03 and her red top are the same red top. 339 00:19:03 --> 00:19:05 That would be a very weird assumption. 340 00:19:05 --> 00:19:07 On the other hand, the guy she's sitting next to 341 00:19:07 --> 00:19:09 is also wearing red. 342 00:19:09 --> 00:19:12 So maybe they're just wearing one garment. 343 00:19:12 --> 00:19:13 No. 344 00:19:13 --> 00:19:15 I'm probably not going to come up with that assumption either. 345 00:19:15 --> 00:19:21 But what my visual system is doing, is continuously trying 346 00:19:21 --> 00:19:29 to cut the world up into meaningful chunks, that 347 00:19:29 --> 00:19:33 are going to be worth subsequent analysis. 348 00:19:33 --> 00:19:35 I don't want to go off and analyze every little 349 00:19:35 --> 00:19:37 pixel in this scene. 350 00:19:37 --> 00:19:40 I don't have the brain power to do that. 351 00:19:40 --> 00:19:43 I want to have meaningful chunks that are worth 352 00:19:43 --> 00:19:46 analyzing, so here I might decide to the meaningful 353 00:19:46 --> 00:19:48 chunks were the rows. 354 00:19:48 --> 00:19:49 They are a something or other. 355 00:19:49 --> 00:19:52 356 00:19:52 --> 00:19:53 OK. 357 00:19:53 --> 00:19:57 358 00:19:57 --> 00:20:00 There's a couple of reasons why you need to do this grouping 359 00:20:00 --> 00:20:06 business over little elements in the world. 360 00:20:06 --> 00:20:09 One of them-- I was sort of cartooning over here-- which is 361 00:20:09 --> 00:20:12 that early in the visual system, the chunks of the brain 362 00:20:12 --> 00:20:15 that are looking at it bits of the world are only looking at 363 00:20:15 --> 00:20:16 very teeny bits, and you're going to have to tie 364 00:20:16 --> 00:20:17 those together. 365 00:20:17 --> 00:20:22 The other reason, is that out in the world, contours 366 00:20:22 --> 00:20:24 don't behave well. 367 00:20:24 --> 00:20:27 They tend to do awkward things like disappear on you. 368 00:20:27 --> 00:20:39 And you don't want to get the idea that these are-- if I've 369 00:20:39 --> 00:20:43 got a contour like that, if for some reason bits of it are 370 00:20:43 --> 00:20:47 deleted, maybe because there's an occluder, or maybe because 371 00:20:47 --> 00:20:50 something just bad happened in the image, you don't want to 372 00:20:50 --> 00:20:53 lose this whole structure, because bits of it 373 00:20:53 --> 00:20:55 have been deleted. 374 00:20:55 --> 00:21:00 So you have a lot clever mechanisms designed to help you 375 00:21:00 --> 00:21:07 find where the edges are of things out there in the scene. 376 00:21:07 --> 00:21:10 And, putting the bits of edges together into 377 00:21:10 --> 00:21:11 a long coherent one. 378 00:21:11 --> 00:21:13 If you play with Photoshop, you can go and find 379 00:21:13 --> 00:21:14 the edges I think. 380 00:21:14 --> 00:21:17 Isn't there like a find edges filter, or something? 381 00:21:17 --> 00:21:19 So, try that sometime. 382 00:21:19 --> 00:21:28 Do find edges on an image of, say, a person, and you'll see 383 00:21:28 --> 00:21:30 that it comes up with a lot of edges that you recognize as 384 00:21:30 --> 00:21:33 being related to this person, but its fragmented 385 00:21:33 --> 00:21:34 all over the place. 386 00:21:34 --> 00:21:38 And, in fact, getting your computer to figure out which 387 00:21:38 --> 00:21:43 bits go with each other is a tricky piece of work. 388 00:21:43 --> 00:21:44 It's tricky for you too. 389 00:21:44 --> 00:21:46 You just don't know that it's tricky, because, 390 00:21:46 --> 00:21:47 it works all the time. 391 00:21:47 --> 00:21:47 All right. 392 00:21:47 --> 00:21:52 So, this beautifully boring stimulus is there, because 393 00:21:52 --> 00:21:59 you see this beautiful vertical contour, right? 394 00:21:59 --> 00:22:02 Now, all I'm going to do, I'm going to leave it there, but 395 00:22:02 --> 00:22:05 I'm going to put a new background on it. 396 00:22:05 --> 00:22:07 Isn't that lovely? 397 00:22:07 --> 00:22:08 Why is that interesting? 398 00:22:08 --> 00:22:12 Well, among the reasons it is interesting, is because 399 00:22:12 --> 00:22:15 it's the same gray stuff that was there before. 400 00:22:15 --> 00:22:17 So, the top of that bar, and the bottom of that 401 00:22:17 --> 00:22:20 bar are still identical. 402 00:22:20 --> 00:22:24 All four of those little rectangles are all identical. 403 00:22:24 --> 00:22:27 Even though they no longer look identical. 404 00:22:27 --> 00:22:31 Because what the system is doing, is-- actually 405 00:22:31 --> 00:22:31 can I do this? 406 00:22:31 --> 00:22:33 I forget what I programmed. 407 00:22:33 --> 00:22:35 Oh, there we go. 408 00:22:35 --> 00:22:38 little key's going to turn into that one. 409 00:22:38 --> 00:22:40 Isn't that fun? 410 00:22:40 --> 00:22:41 Get back there. 411 00:22:41 --> 00:22:43 There we go. 412 00:22:43 --> 00:22:47 -- but my real point -- so what that is, is a simultaneous 413 00:22:47 --> 00:22:49 contrast affect, by the way. 414 00:22:49 --> 00:22:53 This square looks bright, because it's surrounded 415 00:22:53 --> 00:22:55 by darker stuff. 416 00:22:55 --> 00:22:57 That square looks dark, because it's surrounded 417 00:22:57 --> 00:22:58 by brighter stuff. 418 00:22:58 --> 00:23:04 And even though this bar is continuous with it's gray level 419 00:23:04 --> 00:23:08 from bottom to top, it picks up it's apparent brightness 420 00:23:08 --> 00:23:13 from the immediately surrounding contours. 421 00:23:13 --> 00:23:17 The interesting aspect of this from the point of view of 422 00:23:17 --> 00:23:25 understanding were edges are, is that if the bar is brighter 423 00:23:25 --> 00:23:29 than the background here, and darker than the background up 424 00:23:29 --> 00:23:33 there, there must be a place in the middle where it's gone. 425 00:23:33 --> 00:23:35 Where there is no contour. 426 00:23:35 --> 00:23:36 But you don't see that. 427 00:23:36 --> 00:23:39 428 00:23:39 --> 00:23:45 I was too busy making this little thing move, and 429 00:23:45 --> 00:23:46 I forgot to do that. 430 00:23:46 --> 00:23:47 Oh well. 431 00:23:47 --> 00:23:50 It's not a small region. 432 00:23:50 --> 00:23:53 There's a fairly sizable region of that middle there where 433 00:23:53 --> 00:23:56 there is no physical contour. 434 00:23:56 --> 00:23:58 But you fill it in. 435 00:23:58 --> 00:24:05 You know, in some fashion, that contour is there. 436 00:24:05 --> 00:24:07 That's called a subjective contour, where you're 437 00:24:07 --> 00:24:11 completing a contour that doesn't have any real 438 00:24:11 --> 00:24:12 support in the image. 439 00:24:12 --> 00:24:15 That's the piece that your Photoshop filter will have a 440 00:24:15 --> 00:24:17 hard time doing, by the way. 441 00:24:17 --> 00:24:24 Oh, we can also do a second order affect here, that's 442 00:24:24 --> 00:24:26 kind of -- well, no, we'll do that later. 443 00:24:26 --> 00:24:27 Oh. 444 00:24:27 --> 00:24:27 Come on. 445 00:24:27 --> 00:24:28 Go away. 446 00:24:28 --> 00:24:31 You've moved often enough. 447 00:24:31 --> 00:24:32 OK. 448 00:24:32 --> 00:24:34 Let's continue the same point here. 449 00:24:34 --> 00:24:37 All right, everybody sees this rectangle, right? 450 00:24:37 --> 00:24:43 And what are those black things? 451 00:24:43 --> 00:24:46 452 00:24:46 --> 00:24:47 Three quarter circles. 453 00:24:47 --> 00:24:47 Yes. 454 00:24:47 --> 00:24:50 The literalists figured out that these are Pacmen or three 455 00:24:50 --> 00:24:52 quarter circles, or something like that, but you 456 00:24:52 --> 00:24:54 didn't really see that when it came up. 457 00:24:54 --> 00:24:58 You said, oh that's a rectangle sitting on top of four circles 458 00:24:58 --> 00:25:01 of some variety, and, in fact, you still see it as a rectangle 459 00:25:01 --> 00:25:04 sitting on top of four circles. 460 00:25:04 --> 00:25:08 In fact, you're probably reasonably convinced that 461 00:25:08 --> 00:25:09 you can see the contour. 462 00:25:09 --> 00:25:12 463 00:25:12 --> 00:25:13 That's weird. 464 00:25:13 --> 00:25:15 I'm reasonably convinced that there's an interesting 465 00:25:15 --> 00:25:19 artifact on the screen that's creating contours. 466 00:25:19 --> 00:25:20 I don't know what that's about. 467 00:25:20 --> 00:25:21 It looks better over there. 468 00:25:21 --> 00:25:24 It looks less bogus over there. 469 00:25:24 --> 00:25:26 You can probably see the whole rectangle. 470 00:25:26 --> 00:25:31 The white on white borders are not there. 471 00:25:31 --> 00:25:34 There's simply is no physical contour there. 472 00:25:34 --> 00:25:36 There may be here, because the project's doing 473 00:25:36 --> 00:25:38 something mutant. 474 00:25:38 --> 00:25:41 But, there's certainly no contour there, even though 475 00:25:41 --> 00:25:44 the rectangle at the center looks somewhat brighter. 476 00:25:44 --> 00:25:49 Again, what you're doing is, making a guess about what is it 477 00:25:49 --> 00:25:52 that actually created that image that's landing 478 00:25:52 --> 00:25:53 on my retina now? 479 00:25:53 --> 00:25:57 It could be a little conference of pac-people. 480 00:25:57 --> 00:26:00 Four little three quarter circles that got together 481 00:26:00 --> 00:26:02 to talk to each other. 482 00:26:02 --> 00:26:05 But that doesn't seem the most likely possibility. 483 00:26:05 --> 00:26:10 What seems more likely here, is that it's a white rectangle 484 00:26:10 --> 00:26:16 sitting on top of four black circles. 485 00:26:16 --> 00:26:21 And you end up completing that contour. 486 00:26:21 --> 00:26:23 Or this circle for that matter. 487 00:26:23 --> 00:26:26 What are you doing here? 488 00:26:26 --> 00:26:33 You don't need to have fancy computer graphics to do this. 489 00:26:33 --> 00:26:37 One of the advantages of the material in this particular 490 00:26:37 --> 00:26:44 lecture is that it provides great material for doodling 491 00:26:44 --> 00:26:47 in other lectures. 492 00:26:47 --> 00:26:49 So, if you like subjective contours, you can 493 00:26:49 --> 00:26:50 make your own. 494 00:26:50 --> 00:26:53 495 00:26:53 --> 00:27:00 And, so how's that look? 496 00:27:00 --> 00:27:04 Got a subjective contour there? 497 00:27:04 --> 00:27:05 It's not perfectly circular. 498 00:27:05 --> 00:27:07 That's OK. 499 00:27:07 --> 00:27:11 But what seems to happen is that you generate a hypothesis 500 00:27:11 --> 00:27:15 that says, the whole problem I got here, is contours don't 501 00:27:15 --> 00:27:17 just end in the world, they tend to continue. 502 00:27:17 --> 00:27:22 Well, if this guy's continuing, well, what happened here? 503 00:27:22 --> 00:27:22 Well. 504 00:27:22 --> 00:27:26 Maybe it ran into another edge, it's being hidden. 505 00:27:26 --> 00:27:29 All else being equal, it probably ran into an edge 506 00:27:29 --> 00:27:31 that's orthogonal to the direction it's going, 507 00:27:31 --> 00:27:33 let's guess that. 508 00:27:33 --> 00:27:36 And, if we guess a whole bunch of little orthogonal edges, 509 00:27:36 --> 00:27:39 we're back to that earlier demonstration with a bunch 510 00:27:39 --> 00:27:41 of little line segments. 511 00:27:41 --> 00:27:43 I can tie those little bits together. 512 00:27:43 --> 00:27:46 They make a kind of a circle thing. 513 00:27:46 --> 00:27:50 So I end up seeing that imaginary circle. 514 00:27:50 --> 00:27:53 And, in fact, I'm going to start filling in the contour 515 00:27:53 --> 00:27:55 all the way around. 516 00:27:55 --> 00:27:58 That suggests, by the way, that if I was to tilt all these 517 00:27:58 --> 00:28:04 lines a little bit off of straight radial, so that the 518 00:28:04 --> 00:28:09 virtual line segment was not forming a nice, neat circle, 519 00:28:09 --> 00:28:12 that the impression of a subjective circle 520 00:28:12 --> 00:28:13 would get weaker. 521 00:28:13 --> 00:28:15 And you can decide whether or not that's true here. 522 00:28:15 --> 00:28:18 So, see this circle? 523 00:28:18 --> 00:28:25 Now, the question is, we'll give you three choices here. 524 00:28:25 --> 00:28:27 Stronger, weaker or about the same? 525 00:28:27 --> 00:28:31 How vote that this one is stronger than the previous one? 526 00:28:31 --> 00:28:34 How many vote for just about the same? 527 00:28:34 --> 00:28:36 How many vote for weaker? 528 00:28:36 --> 00:28:38 Just about the same. 529 00:28:38 --> 00:28:39 That's a boring demo. 530 00:28:39 --> 00:28:43 I'll have to change that next year. 531 00:28:43 --> 00:28:44 Because, it didn't work well enough. 532 00:28:44 --> 00:28:47 533 00:28:47 --> 00:28:50 OK. 534 00:28:50 --> 00:28:53 Another example. 535 00:28:53 --> 00:28:55 If your following along on the notes, we have now 536 00:28:55 --> 00:28:59 gotten to the so-called Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet 537 00:28:59 --> 00:29:05 illusion, named after Craik, O'Brien and Cornsweet. suites. 538 00:29:05 --> 00:29:14 We're continuing the edge business, but, now, what I want 539 00:29:14 --> 00:29:18 to do is tie that into that topic that I mentioned early in 540 00:29:18 --> 00:29:24 the lecture, about how it is that, what you're interested in 541 00:29:24 --> 00:29:26 is things the surface properties in the world, and 542 00:29:26 --> 00:29:28 you're not interested in lighting. 543 00:29:28 --> 00:29:31 Lighting is very boring. 544 00:29:31 --> 00:29:33 So, what do you see here? 545 00:29:33 --> 00:29:36 546 00:29:36 --> 00:29:45 Some bold soul described this complicated image, boy, 547 00:29:45 --> 00:29:50 slow group, gray thing. 548 00:29:50 --> 00:29:51 Two gray things. 549 00:29:51 --> 00:29:56 550 00:29:56 --> 00:29:57 One is darker. 551 00:29:57 --> 00:30:01 Oh boy, I'm going to bring my pliers next time. 552 00:30:01 --> 00:30:02 This is like pulling teeth. 553 00:30:02 --> 00:30:03 Yes. 554 00:30:03 --> 00:30:09 AUDIENCE: It's like the top of the pyramid, and there's 555 00:30:09 --> 00:30:11 shading on the other side. 556 00:30:11 --> 00:30:12 PROFESSOR: Oh. 557 00:30:12 --> 00:30:13 Yeah. 558 00:30:13 --> 00:30:15 Ok, so the light's coming from the left, or something. 559 00:30:15 --> 00:30:16 OK. 560 00:30:16 --> 00:30:16 Yeah. 561 00:30:16 --> 00:30:20 That's a complicated inference about these. 562 00:30:20 --> 00:30:20 OK. 563 00:30:20 --> 00:30:25 But what you don't particularly see, is this. 564 00:30:25 --> 00:30:30 If I take the edge out, if I take that edge away from the 565 00:30:30 --> 00:30:32 middle here, what you discover is the whole 566 00:30:32 --> 00:30:35 thing is the same gray. 567 00:30:35 --> 00:30:40 That's not obvious. 568 00:30:40 --> 00:30:43 If you were to draw the luminance profile, drag a photo 569 00:30:43 --> 00:30:47 detector across this thing, what you would get 570 00:30:47 --> 00:30:49 is something like. 571 00:30:49 --> 00:30:49 Which side is bright? 572 00:30:49 --> 00:30:50 OK. 573 00:30:50 --> 00:30:50 That side bright. 574 00:30:50 --> 00:30:55 So it rises, then drops across the edge, and then 575 00:30:55 --> 00:30:58 rises back like that. 576 00:30:58 --> 00:31:02 So, that if you take out the actual edge, it's equal 577 00:31:02 --> 00:31:05 on the two sides. 578 00:31:05 --> 00:31:07 So, that's kind of weird. 579 00:31:07 --> 00:31:14 Why does it look like, now, they didn't believe me. 580 00:31:14 --> 00:31:17 They thought I was doing something evil here. 581 00:31:17 --> 00:31:23 582 00:31:23 --> 00:31:23 Here we go. 583 00:31:23 --> 00:31:23 Look. 584 00:31:23 --> 00:31:26 That's why I had this thing slowly sneak up, so you 585 00:31:26 --> 00:31:32 could, well, semi slowly, fast-ly sneak up. 586 00:31:32 --> 00:31:37 What's going on here is that the visual system knows 587 00:31:37 --> 00:31:40 something about edges and about lighting. 588 00:31:40 --> 00:31:46 Edges in the world tend to be fairly abrupt. 589 00:31:46 --> 00:31:50 Lightning changes, so it's bright here, and dimmer over 590 00:31:50 --> 00:31:55 here, lighting changes tend to be fairly gradual. 591 00:31:55 --> 00:31:59 So, if what I'm interested in is seeing what's on the 592 00:31:59 --> 00:32:08 surface, as opposed to seeing the product of boring light 593 00:32:08 --> 00:32:09 and shade variations. 594 00:32:09 --> 00:32:18 What I might want to do is to look for abrupt changes, and 595 00:32:18 --> 00:32:21 to, in effect, suppress gradual changes. 596 00:32:21 --> 00:32:24 And that's what's going on here. 597 00:32:24 --> 00:32:27 598 00:32:27 --> 00:32:30 We might as well do an entertaining second 599 00:32:30 --> 00:32:32 order effect here. 600 00:32:32 --> 00:32:35 601 00:32:35 --> 00:32:38 Remember that negative after image thing? 602 00:32:38 --> 00:32:42 You know, look at red, you see green, and stuff like that? 603 00:32:42 --> 00:32:44 What I should be able to do here, is produce a negative 604 00:32:44 --> 00:32:50 version of this affect, where you'll end up seeing this side 605 00:32:50 --> 00:32:54 is dark and this side is light, even though I'm not going to 606 00:32:54 --> 00:32:57 change anything over here, over here. 607 00:32:57 --> 00:33:02 Stare at that center line, right. 608 00:33:02 --> 00:33:05 Stare rigorously at the center line, and keep staring. 609 00:33:05 --> 00:33:13 And then when I do that, so, this is two illusions 610 00:33:13 --> 00:33:15 concentrates on top of that. 611 00:33:15 --> 00:33:18 Do it again, was that? 612 00:33:18 --> 00:33:18 All right. 613 00:33:18 --> 00:33:25 For the people incapable of following instructions the 614 00:33:25 --> 00:33:27 first time, try it again. 615 00:33:27 --> 00:33:35 So stare at the center and hold your fixation there. 616 00:33:35 --> 00:33:37 Actually, people who got it the first time, keep staring at the 617 00:33:37 --> 00:33:39 center, but the people who got it the first time, can try 618 00:33:39 --> 00:33:41 something tricky-er which is move your fixation, a little 619 00:33:41 --> 00:33:44 bit, and you'll change the proportion that looks 620 00:33:44 --> 00:33:45 light or dark. 621 00:33:45 --> 00:33:49 622 00:33:49 --> 00:33:51 Isn't that fun? 623 00:33:51 --> 00:33:54 You should understand why that works. 624 00:33:54 --> 00:33:57 If you don't, write yourself a little note on your paper 625 00:33:57 --> 00:34:02 saying I don't understand why that works and figure it out. 626 00:34:02 --> 00:34:02 All right. 627 00:34:02 --> 00:34:05 So the important thing is that what you're trying to do here, 628 00:34:05 --> 00:34:09 is you're trying to get rid of information about the light. 629 00:34:09 --> 00:34:11 You don't care about the light levels. 630 00:34:11 --> 00:34:13 What you care about is what's going on in the world. 631 00:34:13 --> 00:34:17 Now Ted Adelson in the brain and cogs department here has 632 00:34:17 --> 00:34:22 exploited this fact brilliantly in a variety of gorgeous demos. 633 00:34:22 --> 00:34:24 One of which is this. 634 00:34:24 --> 00:34:29 It is extremely difficult, even if you've seen this before, to 635 00:34:29 --> 00:34:32 convince yourself that the gray levels of A and B 636 00:34:32 --> 00:34:34 are identical. 637 00:34:34 --> 00:34:35 Which they are. 638 00:34:35 --> 00:34:39 In fact, it's so difficult that even if I stick a bar across it 639 00:34:39 --> 00:34:43 that's clearly the same thing, it's still kind of hard to 640 00:34:43 --> 00:34:45 see that as identical. 641 00:34:45 --> 00:34:47 Your brain wants to do all sorts of things to 642 00:34:47 --> 00:34:51 deny that possibility. 643 00:34:51 --> 00:34:52 What's going on here? 644 00:34:52 --> 00:34:57 What's going on is that virtual cylinder is casting a virtual 645 00:34:57 --> 00:35:02 shadow, that you are busy discounting. 646 00:35:02 --> 00:35:05 You're saying, I don't care about the shadow. 647 00:35:05 --> 00:35:07 There's a checker board. 648 00:35:07 --> 00:35:08 I know about checker boards. 649 00:35:08 --> 00:35:11 Checker boards to go dark square, light square. 650 00:35:11 --> 00:35:12 I can figure this out. 651 00:35:12 --> 00:35:15 That means B is a light square, because it's surrounded by dark 652 00:35:15 --> 00:35:18 squares, and A is dark square because it's surrounded 653 00:35:18 --> 00:35:20 by light squares. 654 00:35:20 --> 00:35:26 And, it's a particularly lovely example of, among other things, 655 00:35:26 --> 00:35:31 this ability to get rid of information about 656 00:35:31 --> 00:35:32 the illumination. 657 00:35:32 --> 00:35:35 This isn't to say that what you do is somehow just run some 658 00:35:35 --> 00:35:37 sort of, throw away the light source information, and 659 00:35:37 --> 00:35:41 don't do anything with it. 660 00:35:41 --> 00:35:42 Get back there. 661 00:35:42 --> 00:35:45 662 00:35:45 --> 00:35:46 What's it say? 663 00:35:46 --> 00:35:47 Cow. 664 00:35:47 --> 00:35:49 665 00:35:49 --> 00:35:53 There's only white and black on that screen. 666 00:35:53 --> 00:35:59 Look at the C and ask where that contour is coming from. 667 00:35:59 --> 00:36:03 That contour, particularly the outside of that C, 668 00:36:03 --> 00:36:06 has extremely little support in the image. 669 00:36:06 --> 00:36:09 What you are doing is making an inference. 670 00:36:09 --> 00:36:12 This time, you're using the shadow information. 671 00:36:12 --> 00:36:16 You don't want to see the shadow. 672 00:36:16 --> 00:36:19 How many people see it not only as cow, also as an embossed 673 00:36:19 --> 00:36:22 word cow, sticking out a little bit? 674 00:36:22 --> 00:36:24 The reason you're seeing the cow at all, is you're 675 00:36:24 --> 00:36:27 assuming that those black things are shadows. 676 00:36:27 --> 00:36:30 If those black things are shadows, it follows the light 677 00:36:30 --> 00:36:31 is coming from the upper left. 678 00:36:31 --> 00:36:36 If the light is coming from the upper left, well, we can go and 679 00:36:36 --> 00:36:42 figure out what shape object must have been producing 680 00:36:42 --> 00:36:46 those shadows, and the answer spells cow. 681 00:36:46 --> 00:36:49 But, if you were to take a look at the C, is 682 00:36:49 --> 00:36:50 about the clearest. 683 00:36:50 --> 00:36:52 Well, I don't know, the O is pretty good too, and so 684 00:36:52 --> 00:36:53 the W, for that matter. 685 00:36:53 --> 00:36:57 Anyway, looking any of those guys, and look at the shapes of 686 00:36:57 --> 00:37:00 the black bits, which is the only thing that stands out from 687 00:37:00 --> 00:37:01 the background, of course. 688 00:37:01 --> 00:37:02 There's nothing else there, except the black bits 689 00:37:02 --> 00:37:04 on a white background. 690 00:37:04 --> 00:37:09 None of those bits say C or O or W. 691 00:37:09 --> 00:37:12 It's a construction based on the assumption that the 692 00:37:12 --> 00:37:14 black bits are shadows. 693 00:37:14 --> 00:37:20 You use that sort of information all the time to 694 00:37:20 --> 00:37:22 do things like see faces. 695 00:37:22 --> 00:37:25 These are so called Mooney faces, named after 696 00:37:25 --> 00:37:26 a guy named Mooney. 697 00:37:26 --> 00:37:30 698 00:37:30 --> 00:37:36 You can tell me a lot about the curvature of these faces, even 699 00:37:36 --> 00:37:40 though, again, there's nothing on the screen except for black 700 00:37:40 --> 00:37:42 regions and white regions. 701 00:37:42 --> 00:37:47 None of which are, themselves, particularly faced shape. 702 00:37:47 --> 00:37:49 I mean look at the eye. 703 00:37:49 --> 00:37:51 Are any of those eyes actually shaped -- look at the guy on 704 00:37:51 --> 00:37:56 the right-- I mean his eye, he's only got one apparently, 705 00:37:56 --> 00:38:00 that eye looks like, I don't know, a mutant bunny 706 00:38:00 --> 00:38:03 or something. 707 00:38:03 --> 00:38:10 If I just presented the eye piece on the on the guy on the 708 00:38:10 --> 00:38:14 right, that black glob that's defining his eye, if I just 709 00:38:14 --> 00:38:17 presented that in isolation, nobody would say, 710 00:38:17 --> 00:38:18 oh yeah, sure. 711 00:38:18 --> 00:38:20 That's an eye. 712 00:38:20 --> 00:38:23 You'd all be saying dalmatian dog before, mutant bunny 713 00:38:23 --> 00:38:25 this time, or something. 714 00:38:25 --> 00:38:32 And, it relies on these assumptions about shadow, is 715 00:38:32 --> 00:38:33 what is what you're doing here. 716 00:38:33 --> 00:38:36 717 00:38:36 --> 00:38:40 It survives inversion reasonably well. 718 00:38:40 --> 00:38:46 But, those don't look like faces very much. 719 00:38:46 --> 00:38:50 What went wrong? 720 00:38:50 --> 00:38:53 You might think, I know that shadows aren't red and blue. 721 00:38:53 --> 00:38:55 But that's actually not the problem. 722 00:38:55 --> 00:38:57 Here they look pretty good, right. 723 00:38:57 --> 00:39:02 Those faces look ok, but these faces look lousy. 724 00:39:02 --> 00:39:04 Why do they look lousy? 725 00:39:04 --> 00:39:07 726 00:39:07 --> 00:39:08 Somebody raise a hand, or something, yeah 727 00:39:08 --> 00:39:09 there's a theory. 728 00:39:09 --> 00:39:11 AUDIENCE: The shadows are lighte than the [INAUDIBLE] 729 00:39:11 --> 00:39:14 PROFESSOR: Yes, if you make the shadow regions lighter than 730 00:39:14 --> 00:39:19 the lit regions, the brain says, that's not a shadow. 731 00:39:19 --> 00:39:20 I don't care about shadows. 732 00:39:20 --> 00:39:24 I don't want to see shadows as entities in their own right 733 00:39:24 --> 00:39:25 particularly, most of the time. 734 00:39:25 --> 00:39:27 But I'll tell you one thing I know about shadows. 735 00:39:27 --> 00:39:30 Shadows are darker than the other stuff. 736 00:39:30 --> 00:39:31 If the shadows are lighter than the other stuff, 737 00:39:31 --> 00:39:33 it's not shadow. 738 00:39:33 --> 00:39:37 It's something else, and something weird. 739 00:39:37 --> 00:39:38 So this doesn't work. 740 00:39:38 --> 00:39:39 But that works. 741 00:39:39 --> 00:39:41 Oh, I suppose the fact that it said on this one, shadow 742 00:39:41 --> 00:39:44 must be darker, might have tipped some people off. 743 00:39:44 --> 00:39:47 744 00:39:47 --> 00:39:48 OK. 745 00:39:48 --> 00:39:50 Let's see here. 746 00:39:50 --> 00:39:54 I think what I will do -- this makes it very natural break 747 00:39:54 --> 00:39:57 point -- where it says Mooney face and we'll go on to this 748 00:39:57 --> 00:40:00 question about making the best guess you can make in the 749 00:40:00 --> 00:40:03 context of going from 2D to 3D. 750 00:40:03 --> 00:40:08 D But before we go on to that, let's us lets take our 751 00:40:08 --> 00:40:11 brief, stretch your limbs kind of break, here. 752 00:40:11 --> 00:42:03 753 00:42:03 --> 00:42:03 OK. 754 00:42:03 --> 00:42:07 Let us gather back together here. 755 00:42:07 --> 00:42:11 756 00:42:11 --> 00:42:14 By the way, it looks like it's getting to be that time in the 757 00:42:14 --> 00:42:24 term, where people are abusing their natural sleep mechanism 758 00:42:24 --> 00:42:27 that I will talk about later on in the term. 759 00:42:27 --> 00:42:32 But looking around at this crowd, I would say that 760 00:42:32 --> 00:42:39 you're not getting the seven to eight you need. 761 00:42:39 --> 00:42:47 Or, if you are, maybe you really need ten and you're 762 00:42:47 --> 00:42:49 catching the extra to 2 here. 763 00:42:49 --> 00:42:57 764 00:42:57 --> 00:43:01 I've been talking about sort of little, almost like atomic 765 00:43:01 --> 00:43:05 small scale examples, of these sort of inferences 766 00:43:05 --> 00:43:06 that you make. 767 00:43:06 --> 00:43:10 And, now what I want to do, is sort of head for the larger 768 00:43:10 --> 00:43:12 picture of how you make an inference about 769 00:43:12 --> 00:43:14 the whole scene. 770 00:43:14 --> 00:43:19 I'm not going to get all the way there, and there are many 771 00:43:19 --> 00:43:21 realm I could talk about this in. 772 00:43:21 --> 00:43:24 So I'm going to talk about it in one restricted area, which 773 00:43:24 --> 00:43:29 is this question of going from a 2D image to 3D inferences 774 00:43:29 --> 00:43:30 about the world. 775 00:43:30 --> 00:43:35 Something that you do automatically, all the time. 776 00:43:35 --> 00:43:38 I want to explain a bit about how you do it. 777 00:43:38 --> 00:43:42 You will see, on your hand out, this is very useless, blank 778 00:43:42 --> 00:43:45 region, that says one two, three, four, five. 779 00:43:45 --> 00:43:48 I'm going to go through a series of depth cues. 780 00:43:48 --> 00:43:50 Probably more than five of them. 781 00:43:50 --> 00:43:52 And, that's what's supposed to go in there. 782 00:43:52 --> 00:43:56 They're all lots of different sources of information that you 783 00:43:56 --> 00:44:03 use to go from the 2D world to the 3D world, many of them seen 784 00:44:03 --> 00:44:06 here in this lovely piece of renaissance art that we 785 00:44:06 --> 00:44:07 will come up back to. 786 00:44:07 --> 00:44:11 But, here's a much more boring piece of art. 787 00:44:11 --> 00:44:12 What do you see? 788 00:44:12 --> 00:44:15 789 00:44:15 --> 00:44:16 Circle, square and a diamond. 790 00:44:16 --> 00:44:19 And, then there's the clever person, who's trying to figure 791 00:44:19 --> 00:44:21 out, I've describe them as pac-man before, 792 00:44:21 --> 00:44:22 but these aren't. 793 00:44:22 --> 00:44:25 But, you see a circle, square, and a diamond. 794 00:44:25 --> 00:44:27 You don't have any serious difficulty inferring 795 00:44:27 --> 00:44:30 that -- triangle, sorry. 796 00:44:30 --> 00:44:33 You don't see this. 797 00:44:33 --> 00:44:37 For present purposes, the important point here is, 798 00:44:37 --> 00:44:41 you can also tell me their depth order. 799 00:44:41 --> 00:44:44 It's in some sense so obvious that you never think about it, 800 00:44:44 --> 00:44:49 but it's a very important source of information about 801 00:44:49 --> 00:44:54 depth order, that you get simply because you know that 802 00:44:54 --> 00:44:55 solid object occlude each other. 803 00:44:55 --> 00:45:02 So you firmly believe that I am standing in front the screen. 804 00:45:02 --> 00:45:05 I could had, well no, I couldn't have, it'd be 805 00:45:05 --> 00:45:09 theoretically possible that I had suddenly cut a cunningly 806 00:45:09 --> 00:45:15 wolf shaped hole in the screen and I'm A, very large, and 807 00:45:15 --> 00:45:20 B, standing over towards east campus somewhere. 808 00:45:20 --> 00:45:23 And, you're looking at me through this set of holes. 809 00:45:23 --> 00:45:27 No. 810 00:45:27 --> 00:45:32 You automatically leap to the assumption that if A looks 811 00:45:32 --> 00:45:34 like it's occluding B, A in front of B. 812 00:45:34 --> 00:45:37 813 00:45:37 --> 00:45:38 Ah, my bunnies. 814 00:45:38 --> 00:45:39 I don't know what happened to them. 815 00:45:39 --> 00:45:40 They got kind of pixellated. 816 00:45:40 --> 00:45:50 But, all right, which bunnies are closer to you? 817 00:45:50 --> 00:45:53 The big bunnies are closer to you. 818 00:45:53 --> 00:45:54 Right. 819 00:45:54 --> 00:45:56 Why do you think the big bunnies are closer to you? 820 00:45:56 --> 00:45:58 Because, you're making an inference that bunnies 821 00:45:58 --> 00:46:01 are roughly bunny sized. 822 00:46:01 --> 00:46:08 And, in the same way, I'm currently making the assumption 823 00:46:08 --> 00:46:11 that you guys are all more or less people sized. 824 00:46:11 --> 00:46:14 If I did not make that assumption, I would come to 825 00:46:14 --> 00:46:17 some very odd inferences about the current view 826 00:46:17 --> 00:46:19 that I'm looking at. 827 00:46:19 --> 00:46:22 So, the people in the front row -- there's a person in the 828 00:46:22 --> 00:46:26 front row -- her head is about two degrees of visual angle. 829 00:46:26 --> 00:46:31 Remember 360 degrees around my head each degree it's about my 830 00:46:31 --> 00:46:34 thumb, so her head takes up about two degrees. 831 00:46:34 --> 00:46:38 And, let's see, there's this guy in the cheap seats back 832 00:46:38 --> 00:46:44 there, his head is only about half a degree. 833 00:46:44 --> 00:46:48 I could make the assumption that he's a pinhead. 834 00:46:48 --> 00:46:49 A guy with a real small had sitting out the 835 00:46:49 --> 00:46:51 deep back out there. 836 00:46:51 --> 00:46:53 Well actually, I wouldn't make the assumption that he 837 00:46:53 --> 00:46:54 was sitting in the back. 838 00:46:54 --> 00:46:57 He's a pin head sitting at the same distance as large head 839 00:46:57 --> 00:47:00 woman here in the front. 840 00:47:00 --> 00:47:02 But that's dumb. 841 00:47:02 --> 00:47:02 Right? 842 00:47:02 --> 00:47:04 Your visual system knows that's dumb. 843 00:47:04 --> 00:47:06 Your visual system knows people are roughly people's sized. 844 00:47:06 --> 00:47:09 Not exactly people sized, but roughly people sized, and if I 845 00:47:09 --> 00:47:12 see a bunch of small things there and a bunch of big things 846 00:47:12 --> 00:47:15 here, odds are that this is closer than that. 847 00:47:15 --> 00:47:18 And that's part of what's giving me my current inference 848 00:47:18 --> 00:47:22 that I'm looking at a tilted plane of people in purple seats 849 00:47:22 --> 00:47:25 is this information about size. 850 00:47:25 --> 00:47:28 If I organize the bunnies the way you guys are organized, I 851 00:47:28 --> 00:47:31 got a much clearer sensation of depth from this 852 00:47:31 --> 00:47:32 texture radiant. 853 00:47:32 --> 00:47:36 So, now you should be able to see sort of tilted 854 00:47:36 --> 00:47:38 rabbit plane, right? 855 00:47:38 --> 00:47:40 Even though you know objectively, it's just 856 00:47:40 --> 00:47:42 sitting flat on the screen, it looks tilted. 857 00:47:42 --> 00:47:43 Is that a hand up there? 858 00:47:43 --> 00:47:44 That was a hand. 859 00:47:44 --> 00:47:54 860 00:47:54 --> 00:47:56 Sorry I missed that. 861 00:47:56 --> 00:47:57 My previous image. 862 00:47:57 --> 00:48:00 We can do that. 863 00:48:00 --> 00:48:07 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 864 00:48:07 --> 00:48:07 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 865 00:48:07 --> 00:48:09 That's another possibility. 866 00:48:09 --> 00:48:13 It could would be that. 867 00:48:13 --> 00:48:18 And, in fact, it is, just a flat image. 868 00:48:18 --> 00:48:20 And you actually sound like you're getting a sort of a 869 00:48:20 --> 00:48:24 hybrid of a tilted plane with bunnies of a range of sizes. 870 00:48:24 --> 00:48:28 Actually, we can see that combination here. 871 00:48:28 --> 00:48:33 So, we got a whole bunch of big bunnies, and 872 00:48:33 --> 00:48:36 two little bunnies. 873 00:48:36 --> 00:48:41 Which is the smallest bunny in this display? 874 00:48:41 --> 00:48:43 The bottom right bunny, right? 875 00:48:43 --> 00:48:47 These guys are identical in size. 876 00:48:47 --> 00:48:48 It's a very minimal display. 877 00:48:48 --> 00:48:50 There's a much more vivid version of this illusion 878 00:48:50 --> 00:48:53 in the book as I recall. 879 00:48:53 --> 00:48:58 It's a very minimal version of the illusion. 880 00:48:58 --> 00:49:09 Because you assume, if you are -- All right. 881 00:49:09 --> 00:49:15 So I still can't draw. -- If I'm looking at two bunnies, if 882 00:49:15 --> 00:49:22 I'm looking at a ground plane, closer is also lower 883 00:49:22 --> 00:49:26 in the visual field. 884 00:49:26 --> 00:49:28 So, you make an automatic assumption that was what was 885 00:49:28 --> 00:49:32 giving this woman that notion of a fairly tilted plane in 886 00:49:32 --> 00:49:34 the first bunny example. 887 00:49:34 --> 00:49:38 You make the assumption that the bottom of the image is 888 00:49:38 --> 00:49:40 closer to you then the top of the image. 889 00:49:40 --> 00:49:45 Well, if the bottom of the image -- let's go a back here-- 890 00:49:45 --> 00:49:52 if the bottom of the image is closer then the top, and these 891 00:49:52 --> 00:49:55 two bunny images are the same size, if this guy's closer, 892 00:49:55 --> 00:49:57 it must be really small. 893 00:49:57 --> 00:50:00 894 00:50:00 --> 00:50:03 Suppose I took the guy from the back row here. 895 00:50:03 --> 00:50:08 His whole upper body fills sort of the top joint of my thumb 896 00:50:08 --> 00:50:09 in visual angle terms. 897 00:50:09 --> 00:50:13 If I moved that image to the front, and sat him in a seat 898 00:50:13 --> 00:50:18 here, he would be about the size of this woman's 899 00:50:18 --> 00:50:20 upper arms. 900 00:50:20 --> 00:50:23 And, I would think, that's a really small guy. 901 00:50:23 --> 00:50:25 902 00:50:25 --> 00:50:29 She could wear him on her --instead of wearing your heart 903 00:50:29 --> 00:50:35 on your sleeve, you could wear the whole guy on your sleeve. 904 00:50:35 --> 00:50:36 So, that's what's going on here. 905 00:50:36 --> 00:50:40 You're making the assumption that small bunny one is 906 00:50:40 --> 00:50:41 closer than small bunny two. 907 00:50:41 --> 00:50:43 They're the same image size. 908 00:50:43 --> 00:50:46 You therefore infer that out in the world, this must be a 909 00:50:46 --> 00:50:49 really small bunny, and that one is just a reasonably 910 00:50:49 --> 00:50:50 small bunny. 911 00:50:50 --> 00:50:54 Now the bunny part turns out to be not that critical. 912 00:50:54 --> 00:51:00 Here you can also see a nice plane going off into the 913 00:51:00 --> 00:51:04 distance with objects that are clearly not meaningful. 914 00:51:04 --> 00:51:04 Right. 915 00:51:04 --> 00:51:06 Big stuff, front and low. 916 00:51:06 --> 00:51:13 Small stuff high in the image and, you simply infer this is 917 00:51:13 --> 00:51:16 close, and stuff up there is far, and you get a nice 918 00:51:16 --> 00:51:19 impression of a tilted plane. 919 00:51:19 --> 00:51:21 920 00:51:21 --> 00:51:28 This is one of the cues that is interestingly variable 921 00:51:28 --> 00:51:29 depending on where you're from. 922 00:51:29 --> 00:51:33 923 00:51:33 --> 00:51:36 The atmosphere scatters light, particularly water in the 924 00:51:36 --> 00:51:39 atmosphere scatters light, that's why the sky is blue. 925 00:51:39 --> 00:51:42 The result is that objects that are far away tend to 926 00:51:42 --> 00:51:44 be both hazier and bluer. 927 00:51:44 --> 00:51:49 Something that you can see in all sorts of works of art. 928 00:51:49 --> 00:51:51 Go to the museum, you can see artists take advantage of 929 00:51:51 --> 00:51:54 this right, left and center. 930 00:51:54 --> 00:51:58 And, you can probably get even in my pathetically 931 00:51:58 --> 00:52:00 reduced version of it. 932 00:52:00 --> 00:52:02 You probably get a sensation of depth here that 933 00:52:02 --> 00:52:04 you don't get here. 934 00:52:04 --> 00:52:09 The geographic aspect of it, -- anybody here from Arizona? 935 00:52:09 --> 00:52:12 Doesn't work well in Arizona. 936 00:52:12 --> 00:52:16 I know this because I went to a meeting in Tucson and it was 937 00:52:16 --> 00:52:19 boring, so I went out for a walk, and I saw this hill, and 938 00:52:19 --> 00:52:22 I said to the guy who was at the street corner with me, how 939 00:52:22 --> 00:52:25 long would it take me to walk to that hill? 940 00:52:25 --> 00:52:29 And he said, three days, four days? 941 00:52:29 --> 00:52:32 942 00:52:32 --> 00:52:37 It's like 50 miles away and it's like 6000 feet high. 943 00:52:37 --> 00:52:41 But it was extremely crisp. 944 00:52:41 --> 00:52:44 And, there's no water in Arizona. 945 00:52:44 --> 00:52:45 I don't know why people live there. 946 00:52:45 --> 00:52:47 It's like hot all the time. 947 00:52:47 --> 00:52:48 And there's no water. 948 00:52:48 --> 00:52:54 But anyway, aerial perspective cues don't work, so not only 949 00:52:54 --> 00:52:58 are you thirsty, put your short one depth cue. 950 00:52:58 --> 00:53:01 Anyway, this works much better in a humid setting that in a 951 00:53:01 --> 00:53:06 non humid setting, but the point is that again you know 952 00:53:06 --> 00:53:09 about-- this is your visual system making use of the 953 00:53:09 --> 00:53:12 physics of the situation in order to infer something about 954 00:53:12 --> 00:53:13 the depth of the situation. 955 00:53:13 --> 00:53:16 956 00:53:16 --> 00:53:20 You also know about the geometry of the world. 957 00:53:20 --> 00:53:25 So, this is an extremely limited picture. 958 00:53:25 --> 00:53:30 If I say, this is a highway going off to infinity somewhere 959 00:53:30 --> 00:53:34 in Arizona, or something like that, that's not 960 00:53:34 --> 00:53:36 a great picture. 961 00:53:36 --> 00:53:37 But you can believe that. 962 00:53:37 --> 00:53:43 Because you know implicitly that parallel lines in the 963 00:53:43 --> 00:53:47 world, if they're in depth, will look like they are 964 00:53:47 --> 00:53:51 converging towards a vanishing point somewhere. 965 00:53:51 --> 00:53:54 Now it is sometimes claimed that this is known as linear 966 00:53:54 --> 00:53:59 perspective, that linear perspective was discovered by 967 00:53:59 --> 00:54:02 artists during the renaissance. 968 00:54:02 --> 00:54:03 That's only sort of true. 969 00:54:03 --> 00:54:06 What happened in the renaissance, was that they made 970 00:54:06 --> 00:54:10 this knowledge explicit, and became able to use it for 971 00:54:10 --> 00:54:13 instance to make their art works. 972 00:54:13 --> 00:54:17 But, your cat and your lizard and stuff know 973 00:54:17 --> 00:54:19 about linear perspective. 974 00:54:19 --> 00:54:20 They just know it implicitly. 975 00:54:20 --> 00:54:26 The same way they knew about arial perspective and size 976 00:54:26 --> 00:54:29 clues and occlusion cues, and things like that. 977 00:54:29 --> 00:54:33 It wasn't that we woke up one day in Renaissance, Italy 978 00:54:33 --> 00:54:36 and suddenly we could use this depth cue. 979 00:54:36 --> 00:54:41 What we figured out was how to paint with this depth cue. 980 00:54:41 --> 00:54:43 And you could do all sorts of amusing things 981 00:54:43 --> 00:54:44 with the depth cue. 982 00:54:44 --> 00:54:46 So, for instance. 983 00:54:46 --> 00:54:49 Lines look more or less the same size, right. 984 00:54:49 --> 00:54:54 985 00:54:54 --> 00:54:58 Let me see if I can change that here. 986 00:54:58 --> 00:55:13 987 00:55:13 --> 00:55:14 All right. 988 00:55:14 --> 00:55:19 Even though we're using crude materials, let's do 989 00:55:19 --> 00:55:23 a forced choice vote here. 990 00:55:23 --> 00:55:26 If you know they're at the same size, so it's boring to ask 991 00:55:26 --> 00:55:27 if they're the same size. 992 00:55:27 --> 00:55:31 But if you had to vote bigger or smaller, how many people 993 00:55:31 --> 00:55:36 would vote that the bottom line now looks bigger? 994 00:55:36 --> 00:55:39 How many would vote that the bottom line now look smaller. 995 00:55:39 --> 00:55:43 Well, I guess that worked, cheap chalk and all. 996 00:55:43 --> 00:55:49 This is an illusion known as the Ponzo illusion. 997 00:55:49 --> 00:55:53 There are a number of ways to account for it, but one of the 998 00:55:53 --> 00:55:56 intuitively appealing ones, at least, is to say, what this is 999 00:55:56 --> 00:56:00 doing, even though you're not particularly seeing it as a 1000 00:56:00 --> 00:56:03 depth cue, is it's telling the chunks of your brain that are 1001 00:56:03 --> 00:56:09 trying to figure out 3D, I see these two converging lines. 1002 00:56:09 --> 00:56:10 If they're parallel lines in the world, they must 1003 00:56:10 --> 00:56:12 be going off into depth. 1004 00:56:12 --> 00:56:14 If they're going off into depth, then this thing is 1005 00:56:14 --> 00:56:17 further away than this one. 1006 00:56:17 --> 00:56:19 Well, if this one is further away, and they are the 1007 00:56:19 --> 00:56:21 same size on my retina, this must be bigger. 1008 00:56:21 --> 00:56:25 If that's not intuitively obvious to you, think about 1009 00:56:25 --> 00:56:28 this as train tracks. 1010 00:56:28 --> 00:56:32 So here are train tracks going off into the distance, and ask 1011 00:56:32 --> 00:56:40 yourself, which maiden here, tied of to the tracks 1012 00:56:40 --> 00:56:43 is in more distress? 1013 00:56:43 --> 00:56:47 It's obvious that this must be the bigger person if we 1014 00:56:47 --> 00:56:51 interpret this as train tracks going off into the distance. 1015 00:56:51 --> 00:56:53 Even though we know that they're essentially 1016 00:56:53 --> 00:56:55 the same size. 1017 00:56:55 --> 00:56:58 You're getting the results of the inference are then 1018 00:56:58 --> 00:57:02 influencing what you see. 1019 00:57:02 --> 00:57:04 They are influencing other inferences that you 1020 00:57:04 --> 00:57:08 make about the image. 1021 00:57:08 --> 00:57:13 Now you can exploit these rules of linear perspective in 1022 00:57:13 --> 00:57:18 much more elaborate fashion then that. 1023 00:57:18 --> 00:57:24 And the great master of that game is Escher. 1024 00:57:24 --> 00:57:29 Here is one of Escher's pictures. 1025 00:57:29 --> 00:57:33 What you want to do again, I think the image looks rather 1026 00:57:33 --> 00:57:37 sharper up on these sides guys, but ask yourself where 1027 00:57:37 --> 00:57:40 the vanishing point is. 1028 00:57:40 --> 00:57:44 So, look at the first floor of that structure. 1029 00:57:44 --> 00:57:46 And, it's pretty clear that those railings are converging 1030 00:57:46 --> 00:57:49 to a vanishing point off to the right somewhere. 1031 00:57:49 --> 00:57:52 Well, now look at the top floor. 1032 00:57:52 --> 00:57:54 That's converting to vanishing point off to 1033 00:57:54 --> 00:57:57 the left somewhere. 1034 00:57:57 --> 00:58:00 And, then when you tried it put the whole thing together, 1035 00:58:00 --> 00:58:03 you've got a structure the doesn't quite hang 1036 00:58:03 --> 00:58:05 together quite right. 1037 00:58:05 --> 00:58:06 This tells you a couple of things. 1038 00:58:06 --> 00:58:10 Thing one it tells you Escher was a very clever draftsman. 1039 00:58:10 --> 00:58:13 Thing two that it tells you is that you do a lot of 1040 00:58:13 --> 00:58:18 these calculations about perspective very locally. 1041 00:58:18 --> 00:58:23 What you do is you say, your attending, let's say, to the 1042 00:58:23 --> 00:58:26 lower floor there, and you say, yeah, this all adds up. 1043 00:58:26 --> 00:58:28 It makes sense. 1044 00:58:28 --> 00:58:30 And, then you direct your attention to the upper floor. 1045 00:58:30 --> 00:58:31 And it all adds up. 1046 00:58:31 --> 00:58:32 It makes sense. 1047 00:58:32 --> 00:58:35 It's only when you try to combine all of that across 1048 00:58:35 --> 00:58:38 whole image, that you realize that the whole image somehow 1049 00:58:38 --> 00:58:40 doesn't quite make sense. 1050 00:58:40 --> 00:58:43 And, that's how Escher can do things like, have staircases 1051 00:58:43 --> 00:58:48 that always go up, and water falls that fall apparently in 1052 00:58:48 --> 00:58:50 an infinite loop and things like that. 1053 00:58:50 --> 00:58:53 Grab yourself your favorite Escher website and or your 1054 00:58:53 --> 00:58:57 favorite Escher book, and you can watch him manipulating 1055 00:58:57 --> 00:58:59 these depth cues endlessly. 1056 00:58:59 --> 00:59:01 It's great entertainment. 1057 00:59:01 --> 00:59:04 1058 00:59:04 --> 00:59:14 Now what I want to do is to bring together the themes 1059 00:59:14 --> 00:59:19 of the lectures to this point in single demo. 1060 00:59:19 --> 00:59:23 At the moment, that doesn't look like much of nothing, 1061 00:59:23 --> 00:59:27 except that, well, I don't know, what does it look like? 1062 00:59:27 --> 00:59:28 Cubes. 1063 00:59:28 --> 00:59:29 All right. 1064 00:59:29 --> 00:59:35 That's interesting, because I don't see no cubes! 1065 00:59:35 --> 00:59:39 Where's that inference coming from? 1066 00:59:39 --> 00:59:42 What you're really have is a bunch of Y junctions. 1067 00:59:42 --> 00:59:44 And you know about Y junctions. 1068 00:59:44 --> 00:59:46 Those are probably corners. 1069 00:59:46 --> 00:59:49 And, they look like they might be kind of cube-y corners. 1070 00:59:49 --> 00:59:51 But, what I'm going to do is rotate each of those. 1071 00:59:51 --> 00:59:56 1072 00:59:56 --> 01:00:03 Now, this is cool stimulus for a variety of reasons. 1073 01:00:03 --> 01:00:06 First of all, now you're really seeing a cube. 1074 01:00:06 --> 01:00:07 Right? 1075 01:00:07 --> 01:00:08 No problem. 1076 01:00:08 --> 01:00:10 Second of all, there are two cubes. 1077 01:00:10 --> 01:00:13 1078 01:00:13 --> 01:00:17 There's the cube, with its face pointing. 1079 01:00:17 --> 01:00:18 Let's try this. 1080 01:00:18 --> 01:00:24 There's that face, pointing down and to the right. 1081 01:00:24 --> 01:00:30 1082 01:00:30 --> 01:00:35 There's that face pointing up and to the left. 1083 01:00:35 --> 01:00:36 So, you've got two cubes. 1084 01:00:36 --> 01:00:38 This is an ambigious by stable figure. 1085 01:00:38 --> 01:00:40 It's known as a Necker cube. 1086 01:00:40 --> 01:00:43 1087 01:00:43 --> 01:00:46 We can quickly draw one of those. 1088 01:00:46 --> 01:00:49 1089 01:00:49 --> 01:00:50 Endless fun for doodling again. 1090 01:00:50 --> 01:00:55 You can make yourself ambiguous figures instantly. 1091 01:00:55 --> 01:00:58 That figure by itself is known as the Necker cube after 1092 01:00:58 --> 01:00:59 a guy named Necker. 1093 01:00:59 --> 01:01:02 1094 01:01:02 --> 01:01:05 So, you're inferring two cubes. 1095 01:01:05 --> 01:01:08 You're inferring one of two cubes. 1096 01:01:08 --> 01:01:11 The cube isn't particularly there. 1097 01:01:11 --> 01:01:14 The black stuff -- all you're seeing is the verticies of 1098 01:01:14 --> 01:01:20 this cube-- but you're still managing to infer the rest of 1099 01:01:20 --> 01:01:24 the cube You can probably see the lines of the cube in 1100 01:01:24 --> 01:01:27 the black region, right. 1101 01:01:27 --> 01:01:30 In fact, you can see the intersection, if you straight 1102 01:01:30 --> 01:01:33 up from here, you can see the intersection of two lines 1103 01:01:33 --> 01:01:34 that aren't there. 1104 01:01:34 --> 01:01:39 1105 01:01:39 --> 01:01:42 I can make those lines go away. 1106 01:01:42 --> 01:01:46 Now take a look at that cube, and imagine that what you're 1107 01:01:46 --> 01:01:52 looking at is a cube -- sort of a wire frame cube-- that's 1108 01:01:52 --> 01:01:56 behind a sheet of sort of black swiss cheese. 1109 01:01:56 --> 01:01:57 You're looking at it through holes. 1110 01:01:57 --> 01:02:00 Can you get it to go back there? 1111 01:02:00 --> 01:02:03 If you get it to go back there, you can hold it back there, you 1112 01:02:03 --> 01:02:06 probably noticed that the subjective contours pretty 1113 01:02:06 --> 01:02:08 much disappear on you. 1114 01:02:08 --> 01:02:09 Why is that? 1115 01:02:09 --> 01:02:13 Well, if it's behind, there's no reason that you should 1116 01:02:13 --> 01:02:14 be seeing those contour. 1117 01:02:14 --> 01:02:15 They would be invisible. 1118 01:02:15 --> 01:02:18 And so the invisible contours become invisible. 1119 01:02:18 --> 01:02:21 Now if you bring the cube back in front in your perception, 1120 01:02:21 --> 01:02:24 you'll see, oh yeah, now if that cube's floating in front. 1121 01:02:24 --> 01:02:26 I ought to be able to see the whole cube. 1122 01:02:26 --> 01:02:28 And now, I can see the subjective contours. 1123 01:02:28 --> 01:02:34 So you can make the subjective contours contingent on which 1124 01:02:34 --> 01:02:39 particular interpretation you care to give to the image. 1125 01:02:39 --> 01:02:44 So, I think this illustrates very nicely the notion that 1126 01:02:44 --> 01:02:51 what you are seeing is your current hypothesis about what 1127 01:02:51 --> 01:02:55 might be generating the image on the screen. 1128 01:02:55 --> 01:02:58 Another thing that it points out, is that you are only 1129 01:02:58 --> 01:03:02 willing to entertain at limited set of hypothesis. 1130 01:03:02 --> 01:03:07 It is extremely hard to look at this and see it 1131 01:03:07 --> 01:03:08 as however many it is. 1132 01:03:08 --> 01:03:14 Eight little disks with chicken feed in them. 1133 01:03:14 --> 01:03:16 With little Y's in them of some sort. 1134 01:03:16 --> 01:03:18 It's very, very hard to see that. 1135 01:03:18 --> 01:03:21 Even though that is perfectly consistent with the 1136 01:03:21 --> 01:03:22 image hypothesis. 1137 01:03:22 --> 01:03:28 You are out there trying to make a guess about the world. 1138 01:03:28 --> 01:03:31 And, you're not willing to entertain all of them. 1139 01:03:31 --> 01:03:33 At least most of them are immediately relegated to the 1140 01:03:33 --> 01:03:35 realm of the very unlikely. 1141 01:03:35 --> 01:03:38 1142 01:03:38 --> 01:03:43 And, normally out in the world, what happens is that a single 1143 01:03:43 --> 01:03:47 hypothesis immediately pops to the four, and you accept it. 1144 01:03:47 --> 01:03:50 In weird situations like this, you can entertain 1145 01:03:50 --> 01:03:51 a few of them. 1146 01:03:51 --> 01:03:55 1147 01:03:55 --> 01:03:58 You immediately narrow down the realm of possibilities to 1148 01:03:58 --> 01:04:01 a few, not to an infinity. 1149 01:04:01 --> 01:04:04 Even though there's an infinite number of possible ways 1150 01:04:04 --> 01:04:07 to generate this thing. 1151 01:04:07 --> 01:04:10 Shadows I've already shown are a depth cue. 1152 01:04:10 --> 01:04:14 The reason for putting this nice piece of renaissance art 1153 01:04:14 --> 01:04:18 up there, is to point out that, while shadows are a depth cue, 1154 01:04:18 --> 01:04:21 you're not actually terribly picky about the physics 1155 01:04:21 --> 01:04:24 of the situation. 1156 01:04:24 --> 01:04:26 At least not the global physics of the situation. 1157 01:04:26 --> 01:04:29 So where's the sun here? 1158 01:04:29 --> 01:04:30 This is an outdoor scene. 1159 01:04:30 --> 01:04:33 Where's the sun coming from? 1160 01:04:33 --> 01:04:36 Well, if you look at the people in the lower left -- the people 1161 01:04:36 --> 01:04:39 on the ground plane there -- it's pretty clear that the sun 1162 01:04:39 --> 01:04:41 must be down and to the left somewhere. 1163 01:04:41 --> 01:04:42 Right? 1164 01:04:42 --> 01:04:46 Well, look at the shadow underneath that portico. 1165 01:04:46 --> 01:04:51 Well, the sun must be up and to the right there somewhere. 1166 01:04:51 --> 01:04:56 There's no consistent source of illumination in this image, but 1167 01:04:56 --> 01:05:00 your perfectly willing to use the shadow information to 1168 01:05:00 --> 01:05:01 give you depth information. 1169 01:05:01 --> 01:05:04 It's giving it to you locally. 1170 01:05:04 --> 01:05:07 The fact that it doesn't add up globally, doesn't bother you. 1171 01:05:07 --> 01:05:11 And it doesn't even bother you to the extent that it bothers 1172 01:05:11 --> 01:05:14 you in the Escher picture where the building was 1173 01:05:14 --> 01:05:15 actually impossible. 1174 01:05:15 --> 01:05:20 Here, you don't recognize the impossibility at all, unless 1175 01:05:20 --> 01:05:23 it's pointed out to you directly. 1176 01:05:23 --> 01:05:27 And, finally I should add to the list, three more than are 1177 01:05:27 --> 01:05:29 rather hard to demonstrate. 1178 01:05:29 --> 01:05:35 That are hard to put up just as Powerpoint slides. 1179 01:05:35 --> 01:05:38 When people think about depth perception, if they think 1180 01:05:38 --> 01:05:41 about depth perception, it's stereopsis binocular vision 1181 01:05:41 --> 01:05:44 that they typically think of. 1182 01:05:44 --> 01:05:46 Your two eyes are in two different places in your 1183 01:05:46 --> 01:05:50 head for most of us. 1184 01:05:50 --> 01:05:53 If you blink from eye to eye, or just cover your one eye 1185 01:05:53 --> 01:05:55 after the other, it's actually better if you hold one finger 1186 01:05:55 --> 01:05:58 out in front of you, and blink from eye to eye. 1187 01:05:58 --> 01:06:02 You'll see the image in the two eyes is not the same. 1188 01:06:02 --> 01:06:04 The difference in those two images is highly 1189 01:06:04 --> 01:06:06 geometrically regular. 1190 01:06:06 --> 01:06:09 And you make use of that regularity as a depth cue. 1191 01:06:09 --> 01:06:11 It's called binocular disparity. 1192 01:06:11 --> 01:06:12 Very useful depth cue. 1193 01:06:12 --> 01:06:17 It's what's giving you the magic eye demos that you get. 1194 01:06:17 --> 01:06:19 Those posters that if you cross your eyes just right, 1195 01:06:19 --> 01:06:21 they jump out in depth. 1196 01:06:21 --> 01:06:22 Those still around? 1197 01:06:22 --> 01:06:25 1198 01:06:25 --> 01:06:27 It's a very useful depth cue. 1199 01:06:27 --> 01:06:29 It's a little on the overrated side, because it's a 1200 01:06:29 --> 01:06:31 lot of fun to study. 1201 01:06:31 --> 01:06:34 People who think that binocular vision is the be all and end 1202 01:06:34 --> 01:06:40 all depth cue, should cover one eye, and ask if the world 1203 01:06:40 --> 01:06:41 suddenly looks very flat. 1204 01:06:41 --> 01:06:44 It looks a little flatter, but I can still perfectly well 1205 01:06:44 --> 01:06:46 tell who's in front of who. 1206 01:06:46 --> 01:06:49 On the other hand, if you want to see what's stereo is doing 1207 01:06:49 --> 01:06:53 for you, on a beautiful day like today, go outside, lie 1208 01:06:53 --> 01:06:58 under a tree, close one eye, and look up into the branches, 1209 01:06:58 --> 01:06:59 and try to figure out which twigs are in front 1210 01:06:59 --> 01:07:00 of other twigs. 1211 01:07:00 --> 01:07:02 You'll have very hard time doing it. 1212 01:07:02 --> 01:07:05 Open the eye, and the whole thing will jump 1213 01:07:05 --> 01:07:06 out at you in depth. 1214 01:07:06 --> 01:07:09 That's the sort of information that stereo is giving you. 1215 01:07:09 --> 01:07:11 You don't have to do it with stereo. 1216 01:07:11 --> 01:07:15 Motion parralax to jump to the bottom of that list, is a 1217 01:07:15 --> 01:07:20 similar sort of geometric clue. 1218 01:07:20 --> 01:07:24 If I'm here, and then I'm here, the image changes in a 1219 01:07:24 --> 01:07:26 geometrically regular way. 1220 01:07:26 --> 01:07:29 You guys are sliding around on my retina in such a way that 1221 01:07:29 --> 01:07:32 these guys are moving more than you guys out in the 1222 01:07:32 --> 01:07:34 back on my retina. 1223 01:07:34 --> 01:07:37 And, I know that, again implicitly, like I know linear 1224 01:07:37 --> 01:07:40 praralax and I can use that to inferred depth. 1225 01:07:40 --> 01:07:43 Try this under the tree, and you can see the same thing. 1226 01:07:43 --> 01:07:46 Close one eye, look up into the branches. 1227 01:07:46 --> 01:07:47 The branches look relatively flat. 1228 01:07:47 --> 01:07:50 Now rather than opening this eye, just move your head back 1229 01:07:50 --> 01:07:53 and forth, and the tree will jump out at you in depth. 1230 01:07:53 --> 01:07:55 Actually quite striking, you should try this sometime. 1231 01:07:55 --> 01:07:58 I don't know if anybody ever does take me up 1232 01:07:58 --> 01:07:59 on this suggestion. 1233 01:07:59 --> 01:08:03 So if you actually try it, let me know so that I know that 1234 01:08:03 --> 01:08:05 somebody actually tried it. 1235 01:08:05 --> 01:08:11 Oh and vergence is another one of these geometrical cues. 1236 01:08:11 --> 01:08:12 Hold your finger out in front of you. 1237 01:08:12 --> 01:08:14 Look at your finger. 1238 01:08:14 --> 01:08:18 Now move the finger towards you, holding it as a single 1239 01:08:18 --> 01:08:20 finger as long as you can. 1240 01:08:20 --> 01:08:23 So I can watch you go cross eyed. 1241 01:08:23 --> 01:08:27 What you are doing is converging your eyes. 1242 01:08:27 --> 01:08:30 And, if you could move your finger further out, you would 1243 01:08:30 --> 01:08:32 be diverging your eyes. 1244 01:08:32 --> 01:08:35 Well, what you can think of that as doing, is taking 1245 01:08:35 --> 01:08:40 like a pair of sticks and pointing them at the object. 1246 01:08:40 --> 01:08:44 It's your visual axis in the sense, you're pointing 1247 01:08:44 --> 01:08:46 at the object there. 1248 01:08:46 --> 01:08:49 And the angle formed by those sticks is narrower if you're 1249 01:08:49 --> 01:08:52 looking far away, then it is if you're looking close up. 1250 01:08:52 --> 01:08:55 And you have a fairly impoverished ability to use 1251 01:08:55 --> 01:08:57 that as a depth cue too. 1252 01:08:57 --> 01:09:01 If you were a chameleon you'd be much better at this. 1253 01:09:01 --> 01:09:05 Chameleons have eyes the move independently and are very 1254 01:09:05 --> 01:09:10 sensitive to the angle that their eyes are pointing. 1255 01:09:10 --> 01:09:15 And, in fact, you've seen the Animal Planet kind of videos 1256 01:09:15 --> 01:09:19 where the chameleon's tongue goes out the length of its 1257 01:09:19 --> 01:09:21 body, and it grabs a fly or something like that. 1258 01:09:21 --> 01:09:23 How does that it know where the fly is? 1259 01:09:23 --> 01:09:26 It knows by measuring the angle of its eyes. 1260 01:09:26 --> 01:09:27 How do we know that? 1261 01:09:27 --> 01:09:31 Well, we know that because, somebody went and put 1262 01:09:31 --> 01:09:36 glasses on chameleon that diverged the eye. 1263 01:09:36 --> 01:09:44 So, in order to point it's eyes at the fly, it had the 1264 01:09:44 --> 01:09:46 angle wrong, basically. 1265 01:09:46 --> 01:09:49 So, you put a fly on a popsicle stick you put the glasses on 1266 01:09:49 --> 01:09:51 the chameleon and then your film the chameleon's tongue, 1267 01:09:51 --> 01:09:53 and the chameleon keeps missing. 1268 01:09:53 --> 01:09:56 1269 01:09:56 --> 01:09:59 If I put those prisms on your eyes, you will adapt, and you 1270 01:09:59 --> 01:10:02 will eventually be able to catch the fly again. 1271 01:10:02 --> 01:10:05 Should you be so inclined. 1272 01:10:05 --> 01:10:08 The chameleon turns out to be a less adaptable creature than 1273 01:10:08 --> 01:10:11 you, and will not adapt. 1274 01:10:11 --> 01:10:14 You can do the same game with chickens. 1275 01:10:14 --> 01:10:15 Put a pair of prisms 1276 01:10:15 --> 01:10:17 on your eyes to divert everything off say fifteen 1277 01:10:17 --> 01:10:21 degrees to the left, and then if I tell you pick this up, 1278 01:10:21 --> 01:10:23 you'll reach fifteen degrees in the wrong direction. 1279 01:10:23 --> 01:10:25 But eventually you'll learn. 1280 01:10:25 --> 01:10:27 Put the prisms on a chicken. 1281 01:10:27 --> 01:10:28 Put some grain down. 1282 01:10:28 --> 01:10:30 Here are the grains here. 1283 01:10:30 --> 01:10:31 The chicken sees it over there. 1284 01:10:31 --> 01:10:32 Chickens pecking over there. 1285 01:10:32 --> 01:10:35 Chickens not getting any grain. 1286 01:10:35 --> 01:10:39 Chicken will do that forever and apparently not 1287 01:10:39 --> 01:10:44 learn to get it right. 1288 01:10:44 --> 01:10:45 Oh, good. 1289 01:10:45 --> 01:10:51 I left myself with enough time to talk about inferences in 1290 01:10:51 --> 01:10:55 a more global sense of combining information 1291 01:10:55 --> 01:10:56 from across the senses. 1292 01:10:56 --> 01:11:01 So, you've got this job to try to figure out what's going on, 1293 01:11:01 --> 01:11:04 I've been talking about doing that specifically with 1294 01:11:04 --> 01:11:06 the visual system. 1295 01:11:06 --> 01:11:11 But, you're collecting information from multiple 1296 01:11:11 --> 01:11:15 sources, and taking whatever the best information is, so if 1297 01:11:15 --> 01:11:20 I show you a movie, you'll get captured by the visual 1298 01:11:20 --> 01:11:25 information, and you're perfectly happy to hear the 1299 01:11:25 --> 01:11:29 words coming out of the mouth of the guy on the screen, even 1300 01:11:29 --> 01:11:31 though it's coming out of some speaker on the side. 1301 01:11:31 --> 01:11:34 And it doesn't matter if they got fancy dolby stereo 1302 01:11:34 --> 01:11:35 or something like that. 1303 01:11:35 --> 01:11:41 Use a cheap, simple speaker sitting off to the side and 1304 01:11:41 --> 01:11:43 you'll still hear it as coming out of the guy's mouth 1305 01:11:43 --> 01:11:43 if you're watching it. 1306 01:11:43 --> 01:11:46 So you're combining information from multiple senses. 1307 01:11:46 --> 01:11:51 The particular example I thought I would discuss with 1308 01:11:51 --> 01:11:59 you, is the ever pleasant example of motion sickness. 1309 01:11:59 --> 01:12:08 So, when I first came to graduate school, my lab was 1310 01:12:08 --> 01:12:16 doing research for NASA on the effects of looking at large 1311 01:12:16 --> 01:12:18 fields that were rotating. 1312 01:12:18 --> 01:12:20 Sort of Omni theater stuff. 1313 01:12:20 --> 01:12:23 If you look at a whole field that's rotating counter clock 1314 01:12:23 --> 01:12:25 wise around your line of sight, you feel like you're 1315 01:12:25 --> 01:12:27 rotating clock wise. 1316 01:12:27 --> 01:12:31 Meantime guys up at Brandeis who we were collaborating with, 1317 01:12:31 --> 01:12:34 were doing the same sort of thing, but their depended 1318 01:12:34 --> 01:12:37 measure was how long it took you to throw up. 1319 01:12:37 --> 01:12:39 Fortunately, that was not my introduction 1320 01:12:39 --> 01:12:42 to graduate school. 1321 01:12:42 --> 01:12:47 But, it will make you sick. 1322 01:12:47 --> 01:12:49 I might as well collect some data here. 1323 01:12:49 --> 01:12:52 How many people have ever been motion sick here? 1324 01:12:52 --> 01:12:53 OK. 1325 01:12:53 --> 01:12:56 What made you sick? 1326 01:12:56 --> 01:12:56 Motion. 1327 01:12:56 --> 01:12:56 Yes. 1328 01:12:56 --> 01:12:59 Thank you. 1329 01:12:59 --> 01:13:03 Could were get a little more specific, while keeping within 1330 01:13:03 --> 01:13:06 the realm of good taste here? 1331 01:13:06 --> 01:13:11 1332 01:13:11 --> 01:13:12 Oh. 1333 01:13:12 --> 01:13:14 Reading on a bumpy bus. 1334 01:13:14 --> 01:13:15 That's one good example. 1335 01:13:15 --> 01:13:17 Anybody got another good one? 1336 01:13:17 --> 01:13:39 1337 01:13:39 --> 01:13:40 We'll take one more here. 1338 01:13:40 --> 01:13:43 1339 01:13:43 --> 01:13:45 Oh, spinning around in a circle. 1340 01:13:45 --> 01:13:46 Did you get sick while you're spinning around in circle, 1341 01:13:46 --> 01:13:49 or after you stopped? 1342 01:13:49 --> 01:13:50 After you stopped. 1343 01:13:50 --> 01:13:54 And, then when you stopped, you felt like you were spinning 1344 01:13:54 --> 01:13:56 around in the other direction. 1345 01:13:56 --> 01:13:58 So when you're spinning yourself around in the circle, 1346 01:13:58 --> 01:14:02 -- you have, in your inner ears, these tubes filled with 1347 01:14:02 --> 01:14:11 fluid, -- and quick drawing here, quick bit of vestibular 1348 01:14:11 --> 01:14:18 physiology --need a nice fat piece of chalk -- oh, it's 1349 01:14:18 --> 01:14:26 yellow -- you've got these tubes inside your ears that are 1350 01:14:26 --> 01:14:34 filled with a fluid, and inside a little space in there, 1351 01:14:34 --> 01:14:37 are these hairs. 1352 01:14:37 --> 01:14:40 If you bend the hairs, it sends a signal off to your brain, 1353 01:14:40 --> 01:14:42 that's the transducer to the equivalent of the photo 1354 01:14:42 --> 01:14:43 receptors from the eyes. 1355 01:14:43 --> 01:14:50 1356 01:14:50 --> 01:14:53 You can imagine taking a bucket and starting to move, the fluid 1357 01:14:53 --> 01:14:56 stays behind for a little while, and sloshes around. 1358 01:14:56 --> 01:14:58 That's why its hard to carry buckets of liquid around 1359 01:14:58 --> 01:14:59 if they are too full. 1360 01:14:59 --> 01:15:03 So if you rotate your head, the fluid tends to stay put. 1361 01:15:03 --> 01:15:07 And, it moves over the hairs bending them and telling you 1362 01:15:07 --> 01:15:08 that you move your head. 1363 01:15:08 --> 01:15:10 That's what's telling you about this sort of motion. 1364 01:15:10 --> 01:15:14 Well, you spin around for awhile, and the fluid in here 1365 01:15:14 --> 01:15:17 eventually catches up with you and starts moving. 1366 01:15:17 --> 01:15:19 Then you stop. 1367 01:15:19 --> 01:15:24 And the fluid keeps going, and you say, oh no. 1368 01:15:24 --> 01:15:27 The other way you can do this, by the way-- so it's very 1369 01:15:27 --> 01:15:30 carefully calibrated system, turns out that alcohol is 1370 01:15:30 --> 01:15:34 lighter then this fluid. 1371 01:15:34 --> 01:15:38 If you drink, the reason you get dizzy, it's not because you 1372 01:15:38 --> 01:15:41 pickled your brain, which is also true, but because you've 1373 01:15:41 --> 01:15:44 dilute it this fluid with alcohol and this stuff 1374 01:15:44 --> 01:15:45 is uncalibrated. 1375 01:15:45 --> 01:15:48 And, now, you move your head a little, and the 1376 01:15:48 --> 01:15:49 brain, says, oh, man. 1377 01:15:49 --> 01:15:51 We just moved a lot. 1378 01:15:51 --> 01:15:52 Don't move that head. 1379 01:15:52 --> 01:15:57 1380 01:15:57 --> 01:16:00 What she was pointing out, is that what turns out to be the 1381 01:16:00 --> 01:16:06 great stimulus for making yourself motion sick, is a 1382 01:16:06 --> 01:16:11 mismatch between the information that in particular 1383 01:16:11 --> 01:16:15 this vesticular system, this balance system, and your 1384 01:16:15 --> 01:16:16 eyes are giving you. 1385 01:16:16 --> 01:16:21 So the example given here of reading on the bus 1386 01:16:21 --> 01:16:24 is a marvelous example. 1387 01:16:24 --> 01:16:28 Because what you're doing, in order to read, you're holding 1388 01:16:28 --> 01:16:31 this thing so it's a relatively stable visual stimulus. 1389 01:16:31 --> 01:16:34 Nothing's happening here. 1390 01:16:34 --> 01:16:36 But your vestibular system is saying [?___bumbidingdi 1391 01:16:36 --> 01:16:39 bingdaeda--___?] lots of stuff is happening. 1392 01:16:39 --> 01:16:43 And your digestive system is busy saying [? Blech. ?] 1393 01:16:43 --> 01:16:46 Same thing happens on a plane, right? 1394 01:16:46 --> 01:16:50 The problem on a plane is that when the plane bounces up 1395 01:16:50 --> 01:16:53 and down, I mean short of catastrophic bouncing up and 1396 01:16:53 --> 01:16:55 down, when a plane hits turbulence and it's bouncing up 1397 01:16:55 --> 01:16:58 and down, what do you see? 1398 01:16:58 --> 01:17:00 Nothing. 1399 01:17:00 --> 01:17:01 Right. 1400 01:17:01 --> 01:17:02 There's nothing happening visually. 1401 01:17:02 --> 01:17:03 What do you feel? 1402 01:17:03 --> 01:17:06 You feel [? bompitdumitbomp. ?] 1403 01:17:06 --> 01:17:09 and you know, [? bloop. ?] 1404 01:17:09 --> 01:17:14 And, the interesting question is why'd you get sick? 1405 01:17:14 --> 01:17:18 It's fine to say that the mismatch of visual and 1406 01:17:18 --> 01:17:22 vestibular information turns out to be nauseating. 1407 01:17:22 --> 01:17:25 But, why should it make you sick? 1408 01:17:25 --> 01:17:29 The answer is, it's another inference. 1409 01:17:29 --> 01:17:31 So, the next question then is what's the inference? 1410 01:17:31 --> 01:17:32 What are you guessing? 1411 01:17:32 --> 01:17:36 1412 01:17:36 --> 01:17:39 You're guessing that the airline food was lousy. 1413 01:17:39 --> 01:17:40 Yeah. 1414 01:17:40 --> 01:17:42 Yeah, you're guessing that you were poisoned. 1415 01:17:42 --> 01:17:44 Why you guessing that you were poisoned? 1416 01:17:44 --> 01:17:47 1417 01:17:47 --> 01:17:50 It's the mismatch that's critical. 1418 01:17:50 --> 01:17:56 If you just make your vision strange, I could show you weird 1419 01:17:56 --> 01:18:01 stuff you hadn't seen before, and you wouldn't throw up. 1420 01:18:01 --> 01:18:04 And, I can also bounce you around, and until I do 1421 01:18:04 --> 01:18:07 fairly dramatic stuff, you won't throw up. 1422 01:18:07 --> 01:18:11 But, if I mismatch what your visual system is telling you 1423 01:18:11 --> 01:18:15 about your body, and what your vestibular system is telling 1424 01:18:15 --> 01:18:19 you, what this is,is a protection of sorts 1425 01:18:19 --> 01:18:21 against neuro-toxins. 1426 01:18:21 --> 01:18:23 How do poisons work? 1427 01:18:23 --> 01:18:27 Well some of them work by attacking your nervous system. 1428 01:18:27 --> 01:18:28 Lot of work by attack your nervous system. 1429 01:18:28 --> 01:18:33 How are you, the owner of the nervous system, going to know, 1430 01:18:33 --> 01:18:37 you're going to think, I can't integrate anymore. 1431 01:18:37 --> 01:18:40 1432 01:18:40 --> 01:18:43 I can no longer remember that I love my mother. 1433 01:18:43 --> 01:18:46 The sorts of things that immediately present themselves 1434 01:18:46 --> 01:18:50 to you as you are being poisoned, are, your senses are 1435 01:18:50 --> 01:18:56 coming unglued from each other, and so if your eyes are saying, 1436 01:18:56 --> 01:18:59 bong-de-bong bong, and your vestibular system is saying 1437 01:18:59 --> 01:19:04 that your body infers that you have been poisoned, and a 1438 01:19:04 --> 01:19:06 useful idea, if you've been poisoned, is to get rid of 1439 01:19:06 --> 01:19:08 whatever you just ate. 1440 01:19:08 --> 01:19:13 So, why does this happen on airplanes and stuff like that? 1441 01:19:13 --> 01:19:17 You weren't built to be flying around at 30,000 feet bouncing 1442 01:19:17 --> 01:19:18 around in the clouds. 1443 01:19:18 --> 01:19:22 It just wasn't what's nature set you up to do, and so you 1444 01:19:22 --> 01:19:24 get the unfortunate situation where even though you haven't 1445 01:19:24 --> 01:19:27 been poisoned, you get sick. 1446 01:19:27 --> 01:19:28 OK. 1447 01:19:28 --> 01:19:29 Enough of that cheery topic. 1448 01:19:29 --> 01:19:32