TED Talk Pattern Extra Credit Quiz

This TED Talk discussed how we can be deceived by optical illusions and why we see what we do. Color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. According to Beau Lotto, We have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. The light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. If you vary any one of those parameters, you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources. The light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world.