Saturday, 4 July 2015

How our Brain Works?

I won't go for a long explanation as you will better understand the concept if you observe it. Brain is the most amazing organ as it can store more details than a supercomputer ever can. But also it is the most silly organ as the memory is based on learning and experiencing things near by. Whenever you see a thing, you recognize it based on learning. How learning works is a little more complicated thing as it has direct equation with focus and emotions. But as we know that we see through our brain, when any object is visible our brain recognizes it based on our previous experiences and learnings. This means your brain matches an object with pictures already stored in it and if it matches even 20-30%, you will identify the object as that thing only.

Some psychiatrists term the recognizing pattern of brain as pareidolia. It means tendency of brain to identify faces in different things (for example: a piece of pizza for thousands of bucks on ebay that glimpsed the image of virgin Mary). However, as since birth the most often thing you have seen is faces, your brain has great database for every part of it. and when anytime you see a thing that resemble slightest of it your brain sees the design as a face.

A science of engineering called 'Neural Network' can be used to replicate the process of understanding the things. By observing different iterations with known results, NN creates a logic against it. And when a test is passed to it, the output is presented based on logics created in iterations.

Some of most common illusions came across due to this are here:
1. Seeing of human face on surface of Mars (though it was light and shadow that resembled it)
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQENG8y1Cqc. You will see a giant face first (and everybody will)
3. Famous Moving Dragon Head Illusion (nothing can better explain than this illusion)

Another thing, whenever you see a new thing that you do not see on daily basis (for example: a new card trick) your brain keeps on receiving and matching images with its database. and this time your brain is so keenly active in verifying things, that you will not notice anything else than it. And that's why when suddenly your concentration from one thing is backed to normal, the array of things you did not noticed creates a Magic.!!

However till the time you are adult, you have learned such huge database that you can easily recognize among thousands of things and can differentiate them. So don't tell me that you wont get fooled by optical illusion :)