The Mind\'s Eye Assignment PDF

Preview

Summary

Assignment was to watch "The Mind's Eye," a BBC documentary, and answer the questions that are included in the document. Received a grade of 39/40 points. Professor was Timothy Donahue and received a B in the course overall....

Description

PSYC 406 – M/W @ 3:30 PM

September 24, 2018

The Minds Eye – BBC Brain Story How the Brain Sees the World Narrated by Dr. Susan Greenfield Assignment: While (or after) watching the documentary, answer the following questions and turn them in for an assignment grade. Use this document as the template. Please leave the questions in bold and insert your answers in-between each question. Type your answers in nonbold, 12 pt. font. Make sure your name appears in the top right-hand corner of the first page and STAPLE any loose pages. The questions do go in order of the video so you could “pause” and “answer” as you go if that is convenient. Please use complete sentences (no bullet points or text speak). Some of the questions are simple, and some require a little bit of elaboration. No references are required. Feel free to use the first person. You might need to consult the internet or your text for a couple of questions. Assignment is worth 40 points. That’s 3 points for each question and 1 free point. However, for any question not answer at all, there is a double point deduction for each question. So, if you don’t answer a question you’ll be penalized 6 points for that question. So, I’d advise you answer all of them. You may also lose partial points for any question not fully answered. 1. Comment on the unusual case of Gisela Liebold. What’s her condition? What as the cause? Why do you think this condition is so incredibly rare? How does Gisela cope/adapt to her condition? In the case of Gisela Liebold, she suffered a stroke and was left unable to process movement. This condition is so rare most likely because the ability to recognize that an object is moving is vital to a human being’s survival and because of this, we are built so that we do not lose this ability easily. In order to cope with her condition, Gisela tries to not look directly at an object that is moving in front of her, as it is very disturbing for her to witness, and looks in another direction where there is not as much movement. 2. While the back of the brain (occipital lobes) contain the primary visual cortex, there are over 30 additional areas of the brain that help process vision? What’s the advantage to this? These 30 additional areas of the brain were found to contribute to the separation between what our brain processes and tells us that we are seeing and what our body has us do. In the study, the narrator’s brain tells her that one of two bars is longer than the other, despite them being the same length in actuality, but her body perceives the two bars as the same length, as when she goes to pick each of them up, her fingers were spread the same distance apart. This would be considered an advantage because although our mind is tricking us, our body knows what the true reality is.

3. Recognition is critical to the process of vison. And perhaps the most important kind of recognition is the recognition of faces. Why is this so critical for humans? What area of the brain specializes in face recognition? It seems that the recognition of faces is so critical to us to because other humans play such important roles in our lives. When we cannot recognize others, we feel immensely scared and alone. Facial recognition lies in the temporal lobe, in the fusiform gyrus. 4. Comment on the case of Lincoln Holmes. What’s his condition? How does he adapt/cope with his condition? What’s the technical name for “face blindness”? Lincoln Holmes struggles greatly with recognizing faces. While he is able to recognize that a face is a face and that all faces are different, he cannot distinguish who a particular face belongs to, even if that is one of his family member’s faces or his own. In order to cope with his condition, Lincoln tries to prearrange when he is going to meet with someone at a certain place at a certain time, which helps him to more likely recognize them when they meet. Prosopagnosia is the technical name for face blindness. 5. Comment on the case of Kevin Chappell. How is his case different than that of Lincoln Holmes? The technical name for what he has is visual agnosia, which is defined as what? Kevin Chappell, unlike Lincoln Holmes, can recognize faces, but he cannot recognize objects and the world around him. Kevin has visual agnosia, which is the condition in which a person can clearly see, but cannot interpret visual information. 6. What’s “attention” got to do with what we “see”? How do the experiments at Harvard by professor Daniel Simon with change blindness demonstrate attention’s role in visual perception? Although we can see everything that is going on within our visual field, our brains tend to lead us astray and want us to focus only on certain objects in our field, therefore paying attention to one thing and ignoring the rest. Daniel Simons at Harvard University conducted an experiment in which most people proved to not notice that in the process of someone handing them a paper and then ducking down to put the paper away that that someone had actually been two different people that look nothing alike. This experiment shows that in a situation, people tend to focus, pay attention, and remember only certain aspects of that situation. 7. Comment on the case of Peggy Palmer? How is her case evidence that attention is very much a part of our visual system? She sees the “whole picture” and yet when she goes to draw it she only draws half the scene. Explain.

2

Peggy Palmer is a woman who suffered a stroke that caused severe damage to the left part of her brain. Peggy’s case is evidence that attention is a part of our visual system because the right side of her brain is paying attention to the world around her, but her left side cannot. This is shown in a quick study in which Peggy was asked to draw a picture of a cat, but could only draw the right half of the cat. Afterwards, she reported that she could see the full cat and had believed that she had drawn a full cat and was surprised to learn that she had not actually. This is because although she could see the cat, the damaged part of her brain did not when she was tasked to draw it. 8. How does imagination affect what we “see” and “feel”? Our imagination fills the void that is caused when we cannot see something, much like what happens when we watch a horror movie and we know that something is there, but we do not know what and our brain tries to come up with possibilities of what could be going on. 9. Comment on the concept that our brain “invents” much of what we see? What’s memory got to do with it? When our imagination is running wild, what we imagine is fueled by our memory, which is supported by the fact that our brain relies just as much on our memory as what we see with our eyes. This is supported by the fact that Kevin Chappell navigates his world mostly on the memories he has from before the accident that caused his current condition. 10. Vision is not a “one-way street” with information flowing from the eyes to the back of the brain. Information also flows from the visual cortex back to other forward areas of the brain where where processes such as expectation, memory, imagination and even bias may affect what you “see”. Give an example of this to illustrate this process. Evidence for vision not being a “one-way street” would be in the case of Kevin Chappell in which his eyes are sending information back to his brain, although the brain is not interpreting it correctly, but he is quite able to pull an image of an object from his memory and use his eyes to see himself draw that object. 11. There is no one area of the brain where all of our visual experience comes together in a single spot. This is probably a good thing, why? The fact that there is no one area of the brain where all of our visual experience comes together in a single spot would be considered a good thing because in the event of an accident or a stroke like one that Gisela, Lincoln, Kevin, and Peggy had, we would lose everything concerning our vision, not just a certain aspect of it, which would be catastrophic to our human experience. 3

12. Professor Rudolfo LLinas has a rather unusual concept of vision as a form of dreaming. Explain. And what do you think about this idea? Rodolfo Llinas is of the belief that dreaming and seeing are incredibly similar, as when we dream we do all the same things we do when were awake. I think this is a very interesting concept and does make sense in the way that he describes it, but something to consider is how in our dreams, we are not always able to control what we see and what we do, so there is still a glaring difference between the two. 13. Comment on the major theme of this documentary which is that the brain “constructs” the world we see, what we call reality. Sometimes the brain “invents” or “ignores” or even “distorts” the world out there. Give a couple examples to illustrate this point. One of the examples can be from your own life or visual experience. Obviously the documentary would be correct in saying that the brain constructs, invents, ignores, and distorts the world around us and it is remarkable that that is the case with our brains and means that we cannot always trust what we see. As for an example of something like this happening in my life, I know that sometimes I have trouble remembering if I said something in particular to one person or another or both and then my brain seems to pick one of the options and create a memory of me saying that to one of them. In one case, my roommate told me something about my housing options for the next school year. After some time had passed, I seemed to think that it was actually my friend that told me this and my brain had formed a visual memory of her saying that to me. Interestingly enough, later I ended telling my roommate that my friend had told me that information and she corrected me in saying that it was actually her that said that and I was a bit embarrassed.

4...