Motion • 2017 • episode "S1E3" • Illusions

Category: Brain

In part 3, Prof. Shapiro shows us that the brain is challenged to process some stimuli from the eyes and sometimes "guesses" what you are seeing. Join him as he takes us through visual perception challenges like the "Curveball Illusion". Has he thrown you for a loop yet?

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Illusions • 2017 • 8 episodes •

Reality?

Part 1 of this eight-part series of shorts introduces the world of the visual scientist. Beyond boggling your mind, Prof. Arthur Shapiro explains how and why you see what you see -- and what part of what you see is actually "real", as opposed to how your mind fills in the blanks.

2017 • Brain

Brightness and Contrast

Brightness and Contrast

In part 2, Prof. Arthur Shapiro takes us through visual illusions that show how our brain processes retinal impressions from light and dark. Watch as things "move" while they are standing still. It will be hard to believe your eyes after watching this program!

2017 • Brain

Motion

In part 3, Prof. Shapiro shows us that the brain is challenged to process some stimuli from the eyes and sometimes "guesses" what you are seeing. Join him as he takes us through visual perception challenges like the "Curveball Illusion". Has he thrown you for a loop yet?

2017 • Brain

The Classics

Artists like M.C. Escher played with our visual perception in their art. In this 4th installment of the series, Prof. Arthur Shapiro returns to the classic visual illusions that show us that what we see is not exactly in plain sight.

2017 • Brain

Grouping

Prof. Shapiro offers us more challenging questions about the way we see as he shows us how light that hits the retina is interpreted by the brain. Can you see something before you know what you are looking at? Check out these illusions and find out!

2017 • Brain

Ambiguous Images

Ambiguous Images

Professor Shapiro shows us how some images can prompt two, or even three, equally valid interpretations. Rather than settling on one interpretation, our brains tend to switch among all of them – leading to some baffling and astonishing visual experiences.

2017 • Brain

Impossible Objects

Impossible Objects

Professor Shapiro shows us a range of objects that seem simple and unremarkable at first glance, but which on closer examination simply cannot be constructed in reality – or are not at all what they seem.

2017 • Brain

Perspective Games

Perspective Games

Professor Shapiro reaches back into history to show that artists, architects and mathematicians have also employed visual “tricks” to baffle and entertain us by manipulating perspective and challenging our ideas of what is real and what is fake.

2017 • Brain

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Imagine a world in which you can think but cannot speak. For many stroke survivors, like former football star Junior and landlord Barry, this nightmare is a reality. Inspired by the experience of his brother-in-law, filmmaker Richard Alwyn has made an intensely moving, personal film about language and its loss. Alwyn's brother-in-law, journalist Dennis Barker, had a stroke in 2011 which left him speaking a bizarre, fluent gibberish – just one manifestation of the condition ‘aphasia' in which people lose or have a severely impaired ability to use language. Speechless tells the powerful stories of two men who can no longer take language for granted. Much of the film is made on the Neuro Rehab Unit of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London's Queen Square. There, Alwyn meets 55 year old Barry who has been in hospital for 4 months since a stroke left him barely able to speak. Courageous and determined, Barry's personality constantly triumphs where his language fails. And two years after his stroke when just 35 years-old, former Premier League and international footballer Junior Agogo is still visiting the Unit as he battles to find his way in the world with depleted language. “I had thoughts but I'm saying, where was my voice? I was baffled, man.” Speechless raises questions that straddle philosophy and science. Can we understand the world if we don't have language to name and describe it? Can we think without language? How much is our identity wrapped up in language? These questions are at the heart of conversations that Alwyn has with clinicians and therapists working to get Barry and Junior back into the world. Speechless is fascinating and moving, upsetting and uplifting in its depiction of the isolating and estranging condition, aphasia.

2017 • Brain

Super Brain

The best-selling authors of Super Brain, Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Rudy Tanzi, describe the basic rules about how our brain functions. Your brain always eavesdrops on your thoughts. Can you teach your brain to become unlimited, by thinking that you have that potential?

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