Pratique du Shadowing: 1 6 What Illusions Teach Us - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

Neuroscience has largely worked out the basic information processing steps that lead to the construction of our conscious experience of the world.

Light reflects off of surfaces in the world.

This reflected light passes through the cornea, pupil and lens before being detected by photoreceptors in the retina.

Let's call the moment that light is detected by cells in the retina time zero.

Our conscious experience of events in the world does not happen at time zero, but rather a quarter to a third of a second later.

During that quarter to one third of a second, a tremendous amount of very complex unconscious

and pre-conscious processing takes the two-dimensional pattern of pixel-like activations at

the retina to a highly constructed three-dimensional conscious experience of objects and events occurring in the world.

Some of the work in my lab has focused on the operations

that happen in this quarter to one third of a second

before we become conscious of what is apparently happening in the world.

I have been especially interested in visual illusions

because they are mistakes made by the constructive processes that go into the creation of our conscious visual experience.

They are mistakes that can tell us useful information about the processes that go into the construction of our conscious experience.

In the case of a visual illusion, we might see something that we know is not really there.

It looks like something is there or is happening that we know cannot really be happening.

Take this example of what is called apparent motion.

In one frame, I show two dots, and in the next frame, I show two other dots.

Even though there is no motion in this image sequence, your visual system creates a motion sequence.

But this motion sequence is ambiguous.

Some of you probably see vertical motion, and others see horizontal motion.

Whatever you see, you can now force your visual system to construct the opposite motion.

Let's say you're seeing horizontal motion now.

To force your brain to see vertical motion, cover the right two jumping dots with your hand.

Now, you'll see the remaining two dots go vertically.

Now, when you take your hand away, you will continue to see the motion jump back and forth vertically.

Likewise, if you want to force your visual system to see horizontal motion, cover the bottom two dots with your hand.

Now the top two will jump back and forth, and when you remove your hand, the horizontal motion will continue.

This apparent motion is, well, only apparent.

It's not real.

There's no net horizontal or vertical motion in the image, and none of the dots are actually moving at all.

We are experiencing a motion consciously that does not exist.

It is a construction of those processes that create our conscious experience.

Apparent motion is a case where we see something that we know is not really out there in the world.

There are other cases where we fail to see something that we know is, in fact, happening in the world.

A beautiful example of this occurs in a phenomenon called motion-induced blindness.

You can see that there are three yellow dots and a blinking fixation point.

In addition, there's a rotating array of crosses.

What you'll notice, if you carefully look at the blinking dot in the middle is

that one or two or all three of the yellow dots will vanish from your consciousness.

But if you make a sudden eye movement, poof, all three yellow dots appear again.

So we have cases where we consciously experience something that we know is not really happening in reality,

as when we see horizontal or vertical apparent motion in a sequence of static dots,

And we also have cases where we fail to see something that we know is happening in reality.

So what are we to take from all this?

While it's safe to assume that there is a reality in itself, it might turn out to function in a radically different way

than it seems to function to us given what we can glean from our flawed sensory constructions.

Yet all we have are our senses

and the constructions of our conscious experience to go on in deciphering what is happening in reality.

Beyond these limitations, we can only try to do the best

that we can in our efforts to figure out the nature of reality as it really is, beyond how it may seem to us.

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.

Pratique du Shadowing: 1 6 What Illusions Teach Us - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

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Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?