Description

This video blazes through one of the fundamental premises of modern psychology.  It covers a range of issues and terms concerning how our brain takes the raw sense data it receives and then fills in parts, edits others, and ignores some.  The output is our perception.  This video discusses a number of optical illusions and the principles our brains operate on the usually work but sometimes don’t.

Discussion Questions

• What is perception?  How is it different from the raw sense data we take in?
• What’s happening in the first optical illusion where Greene’s face is flipped upside down?
• What are some of the things that influence our perceptual set and how we understand our environment?
• What is form perception?  What are some of the rules that our brain uses to organize the world?
• What does he mean “your brain constructs your perceptions”?

Keywords: psychology, perception, belief, emotions, culture, observation, sense, meaning, data, consciousness, reality, knowledge, epistemology