TED Talks: Donald Hoffman talks about the complexity of seeing
The world we see only exists because we see it, because we create it visually. the cognitive scientist donald hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is or as we need it to be? Hoffman studies how our visual perception, developed by millions of years of natural selection, interacts with every aspect of our everyday reality and how this mechanism can deceive us, causing from optical illusions to even distortions of understanding of reality.
The scientist demonstrates that vision is not produced by a passive perception, but the result of a constructive process of intelligence. There is a set of rules that act on our perception to build vision: line, shape, color, movement and depth. In this way, the 3D images we see are the result of immense and intense intelligent image processing, which occupies almost half of the cerebral cortex.
The complexity of seeing and reflections on how our minds construct reality for us are some of the disturbing ideas that donald hoffman presents us with great intensity and energy in its TED talk: Do we see reality as it is? (free translation: Do we see reality as it is?).
donald hoffman
donald hoffman is a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine (The University of California, Irvine – UCI) and Troland Prize winner (Troland Prize) from the US National Academy of Sciences (National Academy of Sciences of the USA). In his research to uncover the underlying secrets of human perception, Hoffman uncovered important clues that point to the subjective nature of reality. Rather than as a set of absolute physical principles, reality is better understood as a set of phenomena that our brains construct to guide our behavior.
His best-known work visual intelligence: How We Create What We See (Visual intelligence: how we create what we see) explains how the visual intelligence, hitherto ignored by IQ tests, which allows us to create complex images. Visual intelligence, according to Hoffman, is more democratic than IQ or the famous emotional intelligence, and we can all be geniuses at creating images. According to book review No. The New York Times, "Donald D. Hoffman tries to make for the view that Chomsky and Pinker did for language, that is, to codify and make accessible the underlying principles of how we see".
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