2.2.1.2.1
To what extent do our senses give us knowledge of the world as it really is?
2.2.1.2.4
How, and to what extent, might expectations, assumptions and beliefs affect sense perceptions?
2.1.4.3
To what extent does personal or ideological bias influence our knowledge claims?
2.1.5.2
Are the following types of justification all equally reliable: intuition, sense perception, evidence, reasoning, memory, authority, group consensus, and divine revelation?
Reality and our perception of it often vary to a far greater degree than is often believed.
We seek patterns in both meaningful and meaningless stimula. Sometimes, we believe a pattern is real when it is not. Other times, we do not believe a pattern is real when in fact it is. To quickly assess the difference between these two types of errors is often difficult. The theory presented in this presentation is that belief in the reality of patterns has been naturally selected as our default setting.
The McGurk Effect shows us that what we hear may not always be the truth. It also helps us to understand what happens when our senses conflict.
"Bottom-up" sensory information of the present can be cancelled by the "top-down" knowledge derived from the past.
Illusions tell us a great deal about how our perceptual system functions. We receive so many inputs from the environment that the brain must prioritize which inputs to trust. Illusions represent the boundaries between conflicting inputs to the perceptual system.
These illusions demonstrate how your brain can be "tricked" into seeing motion when there is none.