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Your Reality Might Not be Mine: Sensory Perception and Empathy | Poppy Crum | TEDxLA | TEDx Talks | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Your Reality Might Not be Mine: Sensory Perception and Empathy | Poppy Crum | TEDxLA
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I believe we can be more human if we
accept more than one reality in February
2015 something happened it had a
divisive impact on the world people said
it challenged their objective truth Time
Magazine said it changed the course of
Internet history
forever I like to call it a fashion disagreement
but there's something more important
about this we have a really hard time
accepting that we experience the
physical world differently many of you
remember the image of this dress a lot
of us see it differently some people see
it as white and gold some people see it
as blue and black I happen to see it as
white and gold turns out I'm wrong the
color you can go buy in the store is
actually blue and black but it's not
about the actual color of the dress
that's not what matters what matter is
how our brain perceives the color in
this image people have looked at things
like demographics whether that drive
these differences doesn't matter if
you're a boy or a girl young or old or
what kind of lighting environments
you've spent time in and at the core of
all of these is that how we experience a
world your brain is constantly
integrating information about your
life's experiences in this case about
luminous Shadow and color to make probabilistic
probabilistic
decisions and it turns out out that we
all have slightly different information
going into that
equation so I can bias you if I change
the context to see this image
differently hopefully maybe we see it
differently now but I can also take it
away and hopefully now we all see it the
same these kinds of perceptual
malleability happen all the
time so I'm hoping we can take some time
and think about where there's power and opportunity
opportunity
in understanding these
differences I'm going to tell you some
stories some are personal some are about
art some are about immersive
Technologies but they're all about the
power of gaining empathy to each other's
experiences that if we can understand
how we can see hear and feel the exact
same information in the world in
entirely different
ways we have an opportunity we have an
opport and chance to move away from all
of the dehumanization that people talk
about and rehumanize our interactions
and the Technologies we build and used
to do this I've been a violinist since I
was three I was nine the first time I
knew my I heard the world a little
differently I always assumed everyone
knew my refrigerator hum to be flat
could write down the notes of a song or
was like really uncomfortable if happy
birthday didn't start on a D
um I have absolute pitch not
particularly unique in this way there
are plenty of us who have this uh we
hear sound a lot like many of us see
color but it does mean we see we hear
the world differently it's not good or
bad it just is consequently I've spent
my life as a neurophysiologist as a
technologist and as a musician trying to
understand these differences in
perception in the brain processes that drive
drive
them as scientists we spend our lives
trying to understand and look for the
ways for the most
similar I truly believe that the
Innovation leaps and interaction leaps
we need to make are going to come from
understanding the ways were the most
different for
example so before my mom passed away she
had macular
degeneration she would say something to
me like I can see but I can't see so
this is kind of a nonsensical statement
what do you do with something like that
uh macular degeneration typically
involves deterioration of the central
part of someone's retina people with it
vision I get ocular migraines the types
of migraines I get a wave of inovation
travels through my brain and my brain
area is important for my central vision
when those cells are being interated by
that wave they can't respond to
information in the external world
and I develop a blind spot in my central
vision it looks a lot like this if you
try reading and tracking the yellow dot
you'll see this is this is a lot like
the experience I
have so for 15 minutes a year when I'm
having this type of
did in order to see something I have to
look away from it
when she says to me I can see but I
can't see I get it I can empathize and I
change I change the way I think about
Innovations to help her life I spent
time building Contraptions that
magnified what she was looking away from
instead of what she was looking at and I
fundamentally think differently about
the types of interactions I can have
with her to
connect it's this place where a headache
and messed up Vision that so many we
spend our times trying to avoid actually
gave me invaluable insight to my mom's
world but it's not always that easy to
see both
sides sometimes we're doing it and we
don't even know it unfortunately though
no truly knowing what someone is hearing
feeling or
seeing is is difficult it's difficult to
know when it's happening and even when
it is most of us don't even know how to
describe it but there are people who are
really good at describing what they see
and it gives us this opportunity to peek
into their sensory World in ways we
might not even realize there's a
condition called facial
dysmorphia so people that have facial dysmorphobia
dysmorphobia
don't see faces
naturally when they're looking at a face
the features appear to move so
everywhere their gaze is directed they
develop a blind spot and it fills him
with nearby
information this gives the illusion of
sort of movement of the faces and sort
of contorted and distorted figures I'm
going to show you an example of that I
was only willing to do this to my face
that's why you get to look at me but
um if you stare at the little cross on
my Follow the yellow crosses and you'll
sort of get an idea of what this
experience might look like for someone
condition okay so you saw that it also
kind of looks like
this Francis Bacon was 20th Century
painter uh very well known for painting
abstract art that and portraits that
were of contorted sort
of distorted figures it turns out
Francis Bacon had a condition that was
likely facial dysmorphobia
so when he was sharing what we look at
Art in this case he was actually
representing how he truly saw the
world man's water lies so this is
something I noticed when I was looking
at this painting that I I thought was
interesting so if you stare I find that
when I stare at one of the lies and I
close one eye go ahead and do
that I actually the Lily seems to pop
out more almost as if it's in 3D okay so
I'm not an art historian art critic but
I am a Scientist and when I see things
like this I I got I had a hypothesis
about Monet's
Vision uh there are different pieces of
information ways that we uh cues we take
in from the world to be able to know
where an object is in space and depth in
particular uh some of those cues make
use of one eye we call them monocular
some of those cues make use of two eyes
we call them binocular cues like color
shading and occlusion whether one
object's in front of the other all of
those can we can get from one
eye but cues that require two eyes uh
something like relative disparity which
is actually a very important cue uh
require that both eyes are functioning
nor functioning normally so I had a
hypothesis that Monae actually couldn't
make use of the information coming from both
both
eyes turns out Mane had very bad
cataracts and when you started looking
around his cataracts were so bad that
when he was painting water lies he
actually had one of the cataracts remove
and this is at a time when we didn't
replate when lenses weren't replaced
so man couldn't have made use of the
information from two eyes but the
information from one eye was likely very
developed at making use of that
information so when you look at this
painting now and you look through one
Manet there's a power to seeing both
sides but we don't always get the
Clairvoyance of the man of mcg's
painting but we can accept and
understand the power of perspective has on
on
perception so I'm going to show you an
example where something as simple as
changing your gaze completely changes
how you experience the
world I want you all to look up to the
right hand corner and you're going to
there's some sunlight in the water and
you should see bubbles that are sort of
rising up to the
surface if you're staring at that
sunlight those bubbles probably appear
to sort of go up and fly off the screen
uh does everyone see that and they flap
with screen kind of at an
angle now shift your gaze to where the
okay so now you probably realize those
bubbles are going straight up you can go
back and forth uh this experience
happens because our brain has a con
trouble resolving conflicting
information about local and Global
motion the bubbles have a horizontal
grading that's moving across them while
they're Rising vertically when your gaze
is directed at the bubbles we can
separate them and we can experience them
both as they are but when your gaze is
directed away we experience an
integration of that information
thing but of course I like to put a
bigger message on it
so there are a few things here it's the
power of perspective something as simple
as moving my gaze completely changes how
I experience what's in front of me
and when I'm my gaze when my P
perspective is directed in one place or
another I can't choose to see it
differently even though I've had the
experience before I don't get to I know
it's there but I can't experience the
same way my perspective determines how I
experience it but I do have the power to
choose to know that someone else might
be experiencing it that way right now
sides the human problem is different and
it's there's a lot of opacity here we
don't always know the state of our biology
biology
and our brains constantly
change things like hearing loss or
changes in our vision these are
happening all the time to our lower
sensory processes but even things like
our environments affect our context and
affect our sensitivities whether we grew
up in a village in Afghanistan or a town
in the midwest or in a city like New
York or k menue with different pressures
neuroplasticity helps us take the
information that's statistically
prevalent and relevant in our
environments and make use of it so that
we change to adapt to our
environments things like color shading
Contour all drive this cultural language
differences and the categorical
boundaries we form can cause us to have
different experiences at the most basic
level of whether we see green or
blue some are more obvious some less
so and sometimes we actually get an
opportunity to try on each other's
sensory experiences we did this um with
a pair of arthritis simulation gloves
what we wanted to do here was see if we
could take a group of non-designers
non-designers
and give them an empathetic experience
of their target User Group to work with
and whether it would
change how they thought about the
problem how would it change their
cognitive approach to the
problem the group with the gloves did
change they thought about Simplicity and
their design they thought about space
they got rid of things like drop- down
menus which are you know completely
terrible for anyone with digit mobility
issues they changed how they thought
about the problem and they changed what
they thought was
important immersive Technologies like
augmented in virtual reality are really
starting to try to bridge this Gap to
empathy in the case of the arthritis
gloves experience was powerful it gave
them an empathetic experience that was
actionable in what they
did but we have to go further we have to
go further than just showing experiences
we have to actually engage sensory
experiences in a way that is authentic
and natural to how our senses interact
in the natural world so let me give you
an example of where I when I realized
how powerful this was if we did this
right uh in we were developing some cont
some new technologies adult Imaging
Technologies at my company
one of the things we were looking at was
brightness just so you realize uh a
typical display you would have bought
three years ago was 300 Candelas per
square meter the natural moon is about 1
to 2,000 kandelas we were looking at
luminances much brighter than that and
we were looking at fire content so we
were watching this fire content and
something happened people reacted I
reacted in ways I hadn't predicted just
by seeing an image of fire and watching
this my body started to expel heat as if
it were
real we to we could
take thermal imaging
cameras and measure changes in the
faces we could the screen wasn't
changing but we were reacting to the
content in a way that was natural
in this case all my brain knew was it
had never experienced fire that was that
bright and wasn't real so it did what it
did best and just based on the luminance
reaching my Rea and my knowledge of
flame my body did what it
does if we are going to build
experiences to try to Bridge and share
and gain empathy to each other's
experiences we have to build immersive
technologies that bridge this natural
sensory experience
so I've been talking a lot about why we
should care about empathy and why we
need to have empathy but there is one
problem we don't get empathy unless we
make ourselves
vulnerable and we don't like to do
that Beethoven lived in fear that people
would find out he was going deaf and
losing his
hearing we have more and more Outlets
which we all use where we get to curate
who we are and what people see about us
but we know from Game Theory prisoners
dilemma Nash equilibrium that we end up
in a suboptimal state not as good as we
could do if we don't share our
vulnerabilities so to get to the place
where we want to be we have to be able
to empathize with others
vulnerabilities but we also have to be
own so the next time you interact with
someone and it doesn't make sense to the
way the way you see the world it
challenges it maybe they challenge
you rather than assuming they have the
same information to make decisions about
the world that you do assume they don't
assume it's
different empathy and experience are
powerful and they give us an opportunity
to change we can change our
behaviors we can change our
Technologies we can change our
assumptions about why someone might be
interacting with us in a way that we
don't particularly
like we need to change our
perspective if you could see hear or
feel someone else's alternate reality
today and question your own
perceptions what will you
change thank you [Applause]
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