How many birds do you see ? ~ கண்ணோடு காண்பதெல்லாம் … கண்களுக்குச் சொந்தமில்லை

How many birds are there in this picture ! – you can ignore the small white one hidden beneath the branches –(excluding that) -  is that two or three or more !!

Seeing is believing, right? Well, actually… What you see and what you think  could well be  different things. Your senses gather information and send it to your brain.  But your brain does not simply receive this information—it creates your perception of the world. This means that sometimes your brain fills in gaps when there is incomplete information, or creates an image that isn’t even there! 

Likely that you enjoyed this song as also the visualization of this song sung by Ms Nithyashree Mahadevan in ‘Jeans’ featuring Aishwarya Rai. 

கண்ணோடு காண்பதெல்லாம் தலைவா… கண்களுக்குச் சொந்தமில்லை… கண்களுக்குச் சொந்தமில்லை…

கண்ணோடு மணியானாய் அதனால் கண்ணைவிட்டுப் பிரிவதில்லை …

நீ என்னைவிட்டு பிரிவதில்லை…

 

அன்றில் பறவை இரட்டைப் பிறவி… ஒன்றில் ஒன்றாய் வாழும் பிறவி…

பிரியாதே… விட்டுப் பிரியாதே…

 

In the movie Prashanth’s characters, Visu and Ramu are twins and are desirous of marrying only twins.  Aishwarya Rai’s characters is not a twin so she has a computer animated holographic twin created for her,  that does not exactly work out as planned. She starts dancing on stage beautifully and then her more conservative “twin” hops out of the holographic lights in a different colored dress and wearing glasses and dances on the stage next to her.  

Well …… pictures too can misrepresent or misread, misunderstood or misinterpreted. The legendary Muthiah Muralitharan’s career was blemished when he was called for throwing – no doubt his action is freakish but it had been  okayed  after tests of bio mechanists. His deformed elbow created an optical illusion of throwing but the arm bend was well within the ICC’s 15 degree tolerance limit.  His action was cleared by ICC after biomechanical analysis in non-match conditions but in 2004 he was tormented again with doubts on the legality of his doosra – all at a time when  there were more than a  handful of raw medium pacers chucking with questionable actions.  Almost all of them escaped without being called by Darrell Hair and his fraternity.  

“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says a neuroscientist. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.” Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences. All of this can bias us. Visual illusions present clear and interesting challenges for how we live: How do we know what’s real? And once we know the extent of our brain’s limits, how do we live with more humility — and think with greater care about our perceptions?  

An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from objective reality. The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a perception that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source. Optical illusions are often classified into categories including the physical and the cognitive or perceptual. Optical illusions are not solely a trick of the eye but also heavily involve the brain's interpretation of visual information.  

          Our perception of optical illusions is controlled by our brains. For example, the brain can easily flip between two different views of an object to turn something that's two-dimensional on a piece of paper into an object that we perceive as being 3-D. It's complicated. The 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded, in part, to David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for their discoveries in how the brain interprets the coded communications sent to it from the eyes. They learned that there is a stepwise process in how the brain analyzes what the eye sees. Each nerve cell or neuron in the brain is responsible for a specific detail in the pattern of the retinal image. But even with Hubel and Wiesel's discoveries and our knowledge of the different parts of the brain that deal with colour, form, motion and texture, scientists still don't really have a sense for how all the messages come together to produce our overall perception of an object.  

My favourite author Sujatha wrote so much about Science fictions and was clearly ahead of his times……. In a Sci-fi thriller of early 1980s  that came in Kumudam weekly ~ and we looked forward to reading every issue of Kumudau for that……………  the storyline was about a guardian of an innocent good looking girl named Leena ~ the knot was whether the events are attributed to evil spirits or science – spirit or illusion – at one point Vasanth frustratingly calls it ‘thundu wire’ [a piece of wire] as all assumptions of Science collapse ….. that was the novel ‘Kolaiyuthir Kalam’ -[Autumn of murders] as it has many deaths befalling like leaves falling from tree.  Understand that in recent years there was a Tamil movie with the same title, but unconnected to that story.  

Good evening and welcome to my photo-posts.  The bird at the right – the Grey Heron’s shadow is reflected in shallow water while the one on right’s shadow is not seen.  Interesting !

 
With regards – S Sampathkumar
11.9.2024