Blog Post 3

The first activity I did was called "Seeing more than your eye does." The activity was called a blindspot activity and was actually very cool. It required you to close your left eye and look at a crosshairs on the computer screen. There was a dot on the screen a few inches to the right of the cross hairs. As you got closer to your screen the dot suddenly disappeared. The second activity I did was called "Contrast/Color 'Illusions'." In this activity the squares that were shown looked different colors in the pictures because of shadows around them, but they were actually the same exact color.
Through the activities I learned that our brain can in a sense play tricks on us. Also shadows can affect what colors our brain sees. The thing that surprised me was in the "Seeing more than your eye does" activity. I found it weird that at a certain distance from the screen the dot just disappeared and then reappeared when I got closer to the screen. I never would have guess that this would have happened.
I am not quite sure how what I learned in the activities can be applied to my everyday life. The two activities don't really apply to anything in real life. I guess the blindspot activity could apply to your life. Don't walk around with one eye closed because you might miss something because you can't even see it.
These activities don't really change the way I think we perceive or interact with the world. I guess it makes me think about the way we see colors and how the same color can look different in different lighting conditions. Other than that the activities do not really make me think differently about how we interact with the world around us. I just think that the two activities were pretty cool and I never realized that we had a built in blindspot.
One other thing I learned in this unit was how certain neurotransmitters can affect how we feel and how our body acts. For example if our brain does not receive enough dopamine we can exhibit symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease. Another thing I learned in this unit is that scientist can make some animals act different by stimulating their brain with electricity. They can control a rat like it is a robot by hooking its brain up to electrodes. I find this rather interesting and a little weird.
The "Man with Two Brains" was a very interesting video. I found it cool how he could draw two different objects at the same time while a normal human finds doing the same thing nearly impossible. I also find it weird how the man didn't feel any different after his surgery. He felt the exact same as before he had the surgery but he acted different in some ways. If he was shown two words that a normal person would connect as one word his mind would register them seperately. I would really like to meet this man in real life and see some of the amazing things he can do.