The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
Well, there's one which- which one of my editors found particularly surprising in which you have what is called a Necker Cube which is a drawing of a cube - just twelve lines showing the edges of the cube on a piece of paper so you see twelve lines - and you look at it and you see a cube not straight head on but slightly to one side like this and if you go on looking at it for some part of a second- some part of a minute or something or other, it will flick over and you will see a different view of the cube, and then if you keep on looking it will flick back to the original one. But there is nothing actually changing. What’s coming into your eyes is perfectly- there is nothing on the page that is changing - what’s changing is your interpretation of the three dimensional picture that you are seeing which shows very clearly that your brain- and it so happens that two interpretations, because the way the thing is drawn are almost equally plausible, so the brain looks at one and then that fatigues it in some way and the other takes over in a way we don’t fully understand and so on- and you see that one, you never see both at once. That shows that what you are seeing is a constructive process in the brain you see. And there are another of other things along those lines, for example seeing in depth is not only due to see your two eyes but it gets slightly two different views of the scene but if you close one eye you can see in depth especially if you move your head, you see, because there are a lot of other clues in the visual scene which your brain interprets as being depth. Remember there is no depth as such on the image on your eyes.
Title: Visual illusions
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
1 minute, 40 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
08 January 2010
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