This video is simply amazing, if you've never seen it before. Its a card trick. A color changing card trick. Watch the trick and see if you can tell how and when they make the color change.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE&eurl=

I think this is particularly interesting because of the way people like to rely on their own memories of their own sensory experiences as 'evidence'.

While this purports to be about 'perception', it's equally as much about deception and misdirection - two other indispensables for both 'magic' and 'psychology' ...

I'm not sure if the creators are claiming this is about perception, I'm the one who used that word. Its true that the makers deliberately set out to deceive and misdirect. From my POV, the important question here is 'did I notice the color change?' not 'were other parties being honest'.

If we fail to be honest with ourselves about the limitations of our perception, we will unknowingly reach the wrong conclusions.

Also, regarding 'psychology', there are at least two ways this word is used. One is related to a collection of beliefs held by a group of people ("One of the tenets of psychology is..."), and the other is related to the way the mind actually functions ("The psychology behind gang wars..."). I believe that most people who study psychology (the collection of beliefs) are actually wrong about psychology (the nature of the mind).

Hey Massage,

I really liked the video - As I watched, I noticed changes, but how I 'interpreted' them is what I find strange. As we got to the end (of the trick, not the video) a momentary thought went through my mind - not in words, just a thought like - >>bad filming the lighting kept changing, distracting.<<<

When the 'real trick' was revealed, I really laughed because I made the connection but on a level so below (or above) my concentration that I forced the reality out of conscious perception and instead I saw the changes as a distraction (changes in light) because the changes in color would have made no sense to the very small center of my focus at the time.

Very interesting.

KK feels as though there was a purposeful deception and misdirection, but we would not be so easily 'deceived' if it was not such a natural tendency in the first place.

For example, we do not live in a quiet world. Ever stand alone in the middle of the desert? Most people are amazed at the 'quiet' some even report 'silence'. But the truth is, if you concentrate, if you really listen, you soon become attuned to the sounds around you. Believe it or not, every source of electricity in our modern world is a noise - compound that with every technological part of our everyday environments.

In the desert where the only noise is nature, our survival instincts are allowed to function without a whole lot of thought. In our modern world we could not possibly interpret every single noise within our range of hearing, so we habituate the noise, basically we ignore it but we still hear it so that when we attempt to 'recall' a sound, or when we realize we hear something that could be important, we cannot put it into context and so we misinterpret it.

The same is true of our vision - we see everything, but over 90% of what we actually see is peripheral because we are not focused on it and therefore, we give it little meaning and hence when we attempt to recall it, we have no context to put it into and so we misinterpret.

Thanks for sharing the video, you know I really like that kind of stuff!

yes prception as a verb is more appropriate regarding psychology of the mind, or how the mind works. Perceptions can vary even in relatively controlled environments - as sensory perceptions, people hear , see different things when they've seen & heard the same thing. Intersting. One possible explanation called proactive inhibition (and my favorite explanation) is that we each bring to each experience a collection of past experiences unique to the individual, and these past experiences affect our new & current perceptions....or how we perceive. I feel this can also be relevant to perceptions as a noun as well - how we perceive, opinons for example as well as sensory perceptions, how we percevie the physical environmnet. OK soapbox time is over

Me too! During the last color change, I thought the lighting was different - but I attributed it to changing the zoom level. At other points (after the changes) 'something' in my visual field was bothering me, but I couldn't tell what it was.

Funny thing is, there were three points in time where I thought to myself "they are up to something, right now...." either because they were taking too long, or being overly wordy/dramatic, or obviously taking a cue of some kind from off screen, or something like that. And those three points corresponded to color changes, and even though I 'noticed' this much, and was suspicious, I still didn't notice what actually happened. Crazy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7jpJ12lBjg&feature=related

This one creeped me out.

Yea - that one is good too. Years ago, my eye doctor had a viewer, you held it up to your eyes like binoculars and he had pictures he would put in it. When I looked at a picture with both eyes open, I saw a table and a chair and some stuff on the table. If I closed one eye, the stuff on the table disappeared and the table seemed to move to the other side of the room. If I opened both eyes the scene appeared as before. If I closed the other eye, the chair lost a leg and half the table was missing and the other half appeared closer to me.

We all have a blind spot in the back of each eye but they are crossed/opposite of each other so that using both eyes helps diminish the effect - which is why they attempt to resolve weak muscles in the eyes of children who have a lazy eye. If they don't resolve the problem most children will literally be blind in that eye as adults. The brain compensates for sight inconsistancy, which causes large blind spots, by ignoring the weak eye, until it is blind.

Message, I was really happy to hear you noticed the same thing I did with the fist video. Somehow it made me feel less freaky.