Six sense....

[EddessaKnight]

Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com  
Mon Jun 2, 9:50 AM ET
 
[highlight]
Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur. [/highlight]
 
And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.  


Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.  


Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.  


Changizi now says it's our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd. His research on this topic is detailed in the May/June issue of the journal Cognitive Science,  


Explaining illusions  


That same seer ability can explain a range of optical illusions, Changizi found.  


"Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don't match reality," Changizi said.  


Here's how the foresight theory could explain the most common visual illusions - geometric illusions that involve shapes: Something called the Hering illusion, for instance, looks like bike spokes around a central point, with vertical lines on either side of this central, so-called vanishing point. The illusion tricks us into thinking we are moving forward, and thus, switches on our future-seeing abilities. Since we aren't actually moving and the figure is static, we misperceive the straight lines as curved ones.  


"Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit in us premonitions of the near future," Changizi said. "The converging lines toward a vanishing point (the spokes) are cues that trick our brains into thinking we are moving forward - as we would in the real world, where the door frame (a pair of vertical lines) seems to bow out as we move through it - and we try to perceive what that world will look like in the next instant."  


Grand unified theory  


In real life, when you are moving forward, it's not just the shape of objects that changes, he explained. Other variables, such as the angular size (how much of your visual field the object takes up), speed and contrast between the object and background, will also change.  


For instance, if two objects are about the same distance in front of you, and you move toward one of the objects, that object will speed up more in the next moment, appear larger, have lower contrast (because something that is moving faster gets more blurred), and literally get nearer to you compared with the other object.  


Changizi realized the same future-seeing process could explain several other types of illusions. In what he refers to as a "grand unified theory," Changizi organized 50 kinds of illusions into a matrix of 28 categories. The results can successfully predict how certain variables, such as proximity to the central point or size, will be perceived.  


Changizi says that finding a theory that works for so many different classes of illusions is "a theorist's dream."  


Most other ideas put forth to explain illusions have explained one or just a few types, he said.  
The theory is "a big new player in the debate about the origins of illusions," Changizi told LiveScience. "All I'm hoping for is that it becomes a giant gorilla on the block that can take some punches."  

Video: How to Time Travel  
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Original Story: Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered

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[mido1]

Is possible but not anyone can achive this thing,and who doesn't has it the gift from birth and who can achive this thing,belive me will have big problems so don't look for it if you don't have this gift

[Herb]

Humans don't really see into the future, but rather anticipate the movements of objects around them.  This is what the author is actually trying to convey.

Regarding it's application to roulette:  We can anticipate where the ball is likely to land without looking at the roulette wheel and we will anticipate the correct number on average every 1 in 37(38 on 00 wheel) trials.

If you're actually looking at the wheel, you can perform beter than expectation would dictate.

[lucky_strike]

I would like to see some one overcome fluctation!

Cheers LS

[pins]

what if every body at the table is willing their ball to win. is the future known before it happens. food for thought

[VLSroulette]

what if every body at the table is willing their ball to win.

Stronger "will" wins? 



Welcome to the forum family pins 

[EddessaKnight]

Is there really such a thing as free will, or are our destinies shaped by forces beyond our control? Here's one way to think about that question: Maybe some people actually have more free will than others. Not because they have more money. (Many rich folks are under the spell of their instincts, after all.) Not because they have a high-status position. (A boss may have power over others but little power over himself.) Rather, those with a lot of free will have earned that privilege by taking strong measures to dissolve the conditioning they absorbed while growing up. They've acted on the advice of Swiss psychologist Dr. Carl Gustav Jung:

[b]"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.[/b]

Perhaps the number hit's us and we don't hit anything???

RoB 

[TwoCatSam]

RoB

Quite some things to ponder!

Sam

[TwoCatSam]

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