Although “Beau Lotto” sounds like a raffle game for hunky men, it’s actually the name of a visual scientist from London who specializes in the psychological impact of our sense of vision. The video above is of his talk given at TED in the summer of 2009. He has 18 minutes to explain the purpose of his research, and suggest the potential impact it has on us as individuals and as a society. In fact, the front page of his site has a quote I was absolutely fascinated by:
Our hope is to engender a more empathic view of nature and human nature by creating spaces of understanding that are indifferent to the contrived boundaries between disciplines. (And people within those disciplines).
The Lotto Lab site has a great section on psychology about how our brains use past understanding of an experience to inform and translate what it is perceiving currently. This, in effect, negates the idea of objectivity in many of the areas in which it is currently applied. The world would be quite a different place if everyone treated objectivity as a myth and acknowledge their own biases toward self-interest.
Examples like this hopefully more than just fun for a few minutes time. We use many optical illusions like this in our curriculum at The Pacific Institute. Understanding how we understand things is key to the peace and harmony that world has been seeking.
Any thoughts on this video or this idea of our past memories informing our perception of the present?
