As tempted as I am to use the video below as an excuse to discuss this Tuesday’s presidential election, I’m going to try my hardest to stay focused on perception instead.
Pickard and Singh’s “micro-macro” pictures are composite portraits of the two candidates, in which each “pixel” of the bigger pictures is a miniature version of their opponent’s photo. In a very real sense, human vision is always pixelated, though, in that photons arrive first to our retinal photoreceptors: a mosaic of discrete neural units, each in possession of the tiniest window to the visual world. These minute windows, called receptive fields, are the trees making up the forest of your perception.
Just make sure that, come Tuesday, you don’t miss the forest for the trees.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Susana Martinez-Conde is a professor of opthalmology, neurology, and physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is author of the Prisma Prize-winning Sleights of Mind, along with Stephen L. Macknik and Sandra Blakeslee. Their forthcoming book, Champions of Illusion, will be published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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