This week in our Wednesday class we watched Ted Talk about neuroscience and the brain’s ability to adapt to different sensations, like how a blind person can regain their sight after having lost it a long time ago and not understand at first what they are receiving.

This was a bit of a meta class for me, and freaked me out since I sometimes get a bit paranoid when things get meta and I start thinking about reality and existence. I think I am the kind of person that is more comfortable with the shadows on the cave wall, and would rather forget reality and be plugged back into the Matrix than face giant jellyfish robots.

What really interests me is the relationship between cognition and perception, because it interests me is how two people can look at the same flowerpot for instance, and both people will register that there is a flowerpot but one of us might focus on the pot, and the other might focus on the flower. What I like to think about is how people with different personalities receive information differently. I like watching Hayao Miyazaki and cry at the end of most of his films, but other people consider the films too fantastical or cartoonish to be taken seriously. It makes the whole thing of immersion interesting because what can we consider truly immersive if we don’t all think the same way?

I love the film Fury Road, I saw it in cinema, but my dad watched it in cinema too and didn’t enjoy it. Does the fact that multiple people side with one film make it the better one, because more people were immersed in it?