Monday, November 30, 2015

Mind, Brain, Perception and Illusion

The brain is the hardware, the mind is the real software. Now the brain is connected to different organs like eyes, ears, nose, tongue and also neurons from the brain are spread across the entire body, right up to the tip of the skin.

Now lets take the example of eye, the structure of eye is interesting. It comprises of lens and a focusing screen called the retina, the eye also has pupil that controls the amount of light entering the eye. 

The lens of our eye is a convex lens, if you have ever used a convex lens to focus light coming from a great distance on a wall, you would have seen the image that forms on the wall would be upside down. 

The same happens with the human eye. The retina is directly connected to a part of the brain that sends the signals of the image to the part of the brain that processes this signals and creates the image in our mind. This also implies that by altering the light entering the brain we can actually create a false impression of reality. The world that we see in front of us is in our mind. 


Similarly ear, our eardrums vibrate to the various frequencies that reaches it(the medium of sound waves being air) and within a certain range our brain is able to perceive the sound. What reaches the brain is the nerve signal generated due tot he the vibration of the eardrum and it is processed in the brain and then we realize that we are hearing a sound. 


Similar phenomenon happens with the nose and tongue as well which leads to the sense of smell and taste respectively. The system is similar to your computer. 


The camera is essentially the input device that sends the the data, it is converted to digital form and the corresponding image or sound is generated and then displayed on the monitor. 


Now imagine someone puts a colored glass in front of the camera. What you will see is that the images that are shown on the monitor are of different color as compared to the original. 


If someone uses a monocular in front of the camera. The image that we will get will give wrong information about the depth of the object from the camera. They would appear way more closer than they actually are. We see the example of this in cricket broadcasts, don't we, we can even see the gum a batsman is chewing even the the camera is over a 120 metres away. 


Light bends around a massive body this is well known and established fact, since we know by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity that the mass wraps the space around itself so space around a mass is curved. So the stars that we see in the may well be located in a different position. The light waves coming from them might have bent around a black hole.







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