Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Just finished another Of The Great Courses while cutting my lawn: Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills by Steven Novella (read by the author). Dr. Novella is a clinical neurologist and assistant professor Yale University's School of Medicine. Many of you may know him from the excellent Skeptic's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Highly recommended.
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I tried to watch some of the video presentation of that course by Novella.
Early on, he presented Bev Doolittle's painting "Pintos" as an example of an "ambiguous stimuli" optical illusion, like the "young/old woman" illusion.
The Pinto paining is NOT an optical illusion, and there is nothing in it that is designed to be ambiguous. It is a straight-up painting of five pintos on a similar looking background. There is nothing that can be interpreted two ways, there is simply some natural camouflage that blends in well, meaning you may have to count horse heads or legs to be sure you didn't miss one.
I could not watch the rest of the material because I decided I could not trust him.
Was I too hasty?