The Underwater Illusionist
2017
Jasper Miura, Christopher Ng
Have you ever played hide and seek with an octopus? I’d recommend you give up now—forget your inability to breathe underwater; I can literally shape-shift.
You may think that I’m just a squishy, spineless slice of sashimi, but I’ve got a whole host of tricks up my tentacles to keep myself off the dinner menu.
We octopuses have managed to thrive in a sea of dangerous predators for, yep, 300 million years thanks to our unrivaled capacity for instant, visually-driven camouflage.
If you manage to catch me, take a close look at my skin.
You’ll see thousands of spots of different colors called chromatophores.
Each chromatophore has a sac of pigment, with muscles that stretch it open.
So when I change from red to black, I contract the muscles to expand my black chromatophores, and relax my red chromatophores.
This color change happens in the blink of an eye!
Changing color isn’t my only superpower—I can completely change the texture of my skin, with protrusions called papillae.
To raise my papillae, I can contract ring-shaped muscles underneath my skin.
With these superpowers, along with manipulation of my squishy body, I can blend into any environment.
Of course, my color tricks all rely on accurate color perception. As a human, you have eyes with three types of photoreceptors, each one sensitive to a different wavelength: red, green, and blue. When humans are born with only one type of photoreceptor, they are truly colorblind.
My eyes, on the other hand, only have one type of photoreceptor. At this point you’re probably wondering how I can manage to see the colors of the objects I blend into. Well, allow me to enlighten you.
Let’s say that you’re looking at this weirdly colorful fish. Light waves bounce off the fish and through a lens that focuses it onto your retina, where your photoreceptors will do the color-sensing work.
However, chromatic aberration can make it hard for you to see clearly. When your lens refracts different colors of light, the difference in wavelength causes them to refract at different angles. At the center of your pupil, this doesn’t really happen, but as we move off to the edges, you can see that the difference in refraction gets worse.
On the other hand, my eyes actually take advantage of this. That creepy u-shaped pupil I have? It’s like someone blocked all the clear, non-aberrated light, leaving me with only the blurry light on the edges of my pupil. As a result, I can only see one color clearly at a time.
Let’s look at the fish again, but imagine you’re me--sensitive to only one color. Right now, only one portion of the fish is in focus. My brain tells me that it must be red. As I move my eye lens around, I bring different parts of the fish into focus--and this gives me information about their resulting color. Now, despite my single photoreceptor type, I have the same color information about the fish as you do!
At first glance (if you can see me at all), my abilities make me one of the most alien creatures on our planet.
However, it may be just this crazy camouflage capability that allows you humans to understand us best.
We octopuses, for our many masquerades, wear all three of our hearts on our sleeves.
Eye Whites
2017
Jenny Kim, Kay Liang, Jodi Scharf
What makes a clear image? The lines? The shading? YES… but also… the white space. This is also true for something else you see everyday: eyes. Have you ever thought about the white space in your eyes? This is called the sclera. This sclera in particular belongs to Charles. Charles, like all humans, has clearly visible whites of the eyes. But in other animals, the scleras are not the same. For example, many non-human primates, like Allie the Ape here, have pigmented brown scleras. You can see there is scarcely any contrast between the iris and the surrounding area. This helps camouflage their gazes from predators and prey alike. On the other hand, conspicuous irises can help with human communication by showing what someone is looking at. This is useful because it is likely that what’s got their attention might be of interest too. We also can tell people’s emotions through other cues like facial expressions and body language.
But can we still notice emotions without these cues… just by looking at scleras? The sight of the shark is carried from Charles’s retinas to his visual cortex, and then passes to higher processing areas. This allows Charles to interpret what he sees. The brain area called the amygdala is then activated in order to determine whether or not the shark represents a real threat and if Charles should react with fear. Apparently the amygdala decided that the sight of the shark is a threat. This causes Charles eyes to widen, showing more of his scleras. Baby Billy looks at a rather frightened Charles. The sight of Charles’s eyes also activates the amygdala. But does activation always require conscious perception of fearful eyes? According to recent studies, it doesn’t. In one study, participants viewed images of eyes with masked faces for approximately 50 milliseconds—which is about 8 times faster than the blink of an eye. The subliminal stimulus of fearful eyes didn’t allow the brain to have enough time for information to be sent to higher processing areas of the brain that can react to this information consciously. But the amygdala was still activated. Therefore, the human brain detects fear from scleral information even without thinking about it. Our early ability to detect fear from eye cues ensures that we know when to walk away from dangerous situations.
Infants can also distinguish between direct and averted gazes. 3-6 month olds can follow gazes but are not capable of directing their attention toward the object of interest. However, at around 9-14 months, infants develop the ability to direct their attention and even point to what others are looking at. By the time we are adults, we develop many ways of interpreting and understanding social cues. When someone looks down at their food, this signals that a bite is about to occur. A person watching often responds to that signal by looking away. Natural gaze signaling happens in social contexts such as sharing a meal or going on a date. This is Charles’s first date with Michelle. The scleras’ of his past dates have informed him that they weren’t “the ones”. Hyper Helen centered her iris on Charles for too long. Disgusted Dana had squinted eyes with a small scleras. Not-interested Nelly kept averting her eyes. Thinking about his failed romantic encounters makes him sad, which is shown by his downward looking gaze. Charles wonders what Michelle is thinking. She looks happy though, as her smaller visible scleras may indicate joy.
Inattentional Blindness
2017
Ilana Emanuel, Renny Ma, Libby Rogan, Cecilia Tamburro
Narrator: This is Cedric. Cedric is seeing a magic show today.
Wizard: Come one, come all, to my very special magic show. You won’t even believe your eyes. You there, pick a card, any card. Don’t be shy, show the crowd. What is your card?
Wizard: Now, be sure to remember this card.
Wizard: And now I will pull that card...out of these flames!
Wizard: Thank you, thank you
Crowd: Clapping, cheering
Narrator: Now, Cedric, we’re going to quiz you.
Narrator: What was the card?
Where did the fire come from?
….what did the thief look like?
Narrator: Let’s take a look at what Cedric saw. Or more importantly, what he didn’t see.
Narrator: Because Cedric was paying such close attention to the magic trick, he didn’t even see the theft going on right in front of his eyes. In fact, he didn’t see ANY of these strange, unexpected things. How could that be?
Narrator: This is called Inattentional blindness.
You’ve probably experienced this if you’ve ever tried to text and drive at the same time.
Or when you’re so focused on one thing, that you completely miss something right under your nose.
But do you have any idea how it works?
Wizard: “Let’s take a look inside your head, shall we Cedric?”
Studies have shown that humans rely on a number of networks in the brain in order to process the visual world.
When we look at an object, the object’s image enters our eyes and is passively recorded in the brain. This is an innate response.
In order to see that same object, we rely on things like experience, education, and values in order to categorize and interpret what that object is.
There’s a significant difference between looking at something and actually seeing it. As our eyes look at the images in front of us, these images reach a bottleneck where they compete for our conscious perception. The images that actually make it through that bottleneck are the images that we’ve paid attention to. These are the images that we see.
What can the brain show us about this phenomenon?
When your eyes are open, the pictures in your visual field hit your retina and travel to your visual cortex. This happens when you look at something.
Then, the information travels to your temporo-parieto-occipital areas, where your brain reads the edges, light, and other basic aspects of the scene.
Finally, your frontoparietal network processes the information. This is when you actually see the card.
So what happens when you’re inattentionally blind?
Your eyes still see everything in your visual field, but you aren’t aware of it. Why?
Researchers have found that when someone is aware of what they’re seeing, electrodes in the brain register a pulse called the visual awareness negativity, or “VAN”. But, when you’re inattentionally blind, this signal doesn’t even show up. These results suggest that what you’re paying attention to can control what your brain is able to process.
Let’s return to Cedric.
Like all humans, Cedric’s brain doesn’t allow him to see everything. It’s not physically possible.
But despite this barrier, what can Cedric do to be more aware?
Paying attention to important events can help him remember them better. And intentionally noticing, then dismissing distractions can help him avoid visual distortion.
Inattentional blindness is innate -- there is nothing we can do to completely eliminate it. However, these mindfulness techniques can sharpen an individual's ability to control their own focus.
Pay attention to the ways that your brain may be blinding you. You never know what you might see.
How Artists Perform Neuroscience
2017
Raisa Khan, Selene Means, Elena Renken
The artist starts with a single mark. Lines connect, begin to take form, facial features become clearer, and shading creates an illusion of depth in a 2D creation.
This common process of constructing a face is very similar to the processes the human brain uses to recognize one.
Take this portrait.
Light reflecting off the portrait is focused onto the retina, forming a detailed image of the face composed of information about light, in its many colors, and dark, which is the absence of light.
This arrangement of light and dark captured by photoreceptors is converted into electrical signals that travel to the primary visual cortex.
All of these cells in the primary visual cortex are looking at one sector of the world, but each neuron is maximally excited by a particular feature, such as orientation, within that sector. As the orientation of the bar changes, different cells respond to different orientations.
In real life, edges of natural objects extend across many different sectors of your visual field, activating neurons within many regions across your primary visual cortex.
How does the brain know that these cell responses are representing continuous edges of a single object?
There are cells in other visual areas of the brain that react to specific configurations of these cell responses unique to one particular object. This chain of responses works to identify shapes like faces from certain constellations of cell responses.
But are lines enough, or are other cues necessary?
Look at this picture. Can you figure out what it is?
What about this one? A little easier?
The contours are the same, and the cells we described would respond the same way to both portraits. But only in one do we recognize a face because light and shadow are depicted.
Our brains combine different types of information -- like line, shadow, color, or motion -- to create a view of the world.
Artists have depicted the human face in many different forms throughout history, playing upon our brains’ fixation on faces to explore different styles.
A brain structure called the fusiform gyrus builds a strength in identifying a familiar category of objects — such as faces. This strength fills in the blanks as we perceive faces in different art styles.
This strength fills in the blanks as we perceive faces in different art styles, and explains our tendency to see faces where there are none; seeing faces on inanimate objects is a common phenomenon called pareidolia.
Even infants will look longer at a face than anything else — our ability for facial recognition seems to be innate, somehow tied to our humanness.
The diverse processes used by artists tap into an intuitive understanding of the way the brain analyzes the visual world to perceive a face.
Artists may not work in labs or examine brain cells, but artists perform their own kind of neuroscience.
