Seeing Myself See: The Ecology of MindR Beau Lotto, Reader in neuroscience and head of Lotto Lab at University College London, talks about how colour, vision and “seeing ourselves see” can contribute to a richer, more empathetic view of nature and human nature.
To understand the human mind it is necessary to understand what we actually see when we open our eyes. Colour suggests an answer to this question: we see not the world as it is, but a world that was useful to see in the past.
Beau Lotto performs a series of experiments involving the sky, music and bumblebees that show how quickly the brain can learn to see what is useful, and demonstrate that our perception and conception of the world reflects our past physical, social and cultural interactions.
These optical and colour experiments illustrate that none of us is an outside observer of nature defined by our essential properties, but is instead defined by our interactions with nature.
