Beau Lotto is a visiting scholar at New York University. His research explores how the brain adapts to uncertainty at the cellular, computational and perceptual levels with the aim of understanding the fundamental principles of biologically-inspired innovation.
Lotto was born in Seattle and earned his bachelor's degree in anatomy and physiology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991. He then moved to Scotland, where he earned his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Developmental Neuroscience from University Medical School, Edinburgh in 1994. He remained in Edinburgh for his first Postdoctoral Fellowship (with Professor David Price), and then moved to Duke University for his second Fellowship, where he was mentored by Professor Dale Purves.
He was a Lecturer and then Reader at University College London [1] and is now a visiting scholar at New York University. [2] He has mentored Undergraduate, Masters and PhD students, as well as Postdoctoral fellows. Beau and his lab have published over 70 peer reviewed articles across multiple disciplines including human perception, neuroelectrophysiology, molecular and cellular brain development, bumblebee visual behaviour, digital music, graph theory, complex systems theory, computational evolution, artificial intelligence, architecture, theatre and design. While at the Institute of Ophthalmology, his lab created the first app for the blind that was available on the app store. His lab has received funding from a wide range of institutions including the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the BBSRC, EPSCR and MRC. [3]
In 2001, he founded The Lab of Misfits LLC, a neuroperception creative studio. Lab of Misfits has held a two-year residency at London's Science Museum, where it became one of the UK's first ‘open labs,’ where anyone from the public could conduct real science. [4] The Lab creates 'Experiential Experiments’ that engage the public for partnered organizations including Cirque du Soleil, [5] L’Oreal and Asurion. [2]
The Lab of Misfits, in collaboration with educator David Strudwick, also created the science education programme called iScientist, which uses science to teach children from ages 6 to 16 years old Compassion, Creativity, Choice, Community and Courage. [6] The program resulted in the world's youngest peer reviewed scientist at 8 and 10-years-old, and the - then - youngest mainstage TED speaker at 12-years -old when Amy joined Beau on stage. [7]
Lotto is also CEO and Founder of the augmented reality company Ripple Inc., which holds five patents in Augmented Reality (AR), with two further patents pending. [8] Ripple has produced GPS-based AR apps in the industry, including Traces [9] and Frienji.
In addition to three mainstage TED talks, [10] [11] Lotto has spoken at the G8, Google's Zeitgeist, Wired, Davos, Canne Lions Creativity Festival, Burning Man and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He has contributed to television, radio and podcast programs by the BBC, National Geographic*, HBO, Wharton on Business Radio,* and PBS. He is a frequent keynote speaker at major corporations including J&J, Warner Music, Universal, Viacom, Sainsburys, Microsoft, Google, Apple, where he speaks about the fundamental barriers to thriving in uncertainty and how to overcome them.
He received the Josef Albers Prize for ‘Disruptive Innovation’ at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, [12] and was the first Creator in Residence at Viacom. [13]
Beau (with Mark Lythgoe and Mark Miodownick) were the first scientists to exhibit at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank in London when they were asked to take part in the Dan Flavin Retrospective. [18] His illusions, created with Dale Purves, have been exhibited in 30 science museums around the world, and published in multiple books on illusions. His work has been included in arts events at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, as well as a solo show at the Wellcome Trust Collection. He currently has a live public art installation at ‘Silicon Roundabout’ on Old Street in London called Ommatidium commissioned by Transport for London. [19] [20]
The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision.
An illusion is a distortion of the senses, which can reveal how the mind normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. Although illusions distort the human perception of reality, they are generally shared by most people.
In visual perception, an optical illusion is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions. A classical example for a physical distortion would be the apparent bending of a stick half immerged in water; an example for a physiological paradox is the motion aftereffect. An example for a physiological fiction is an afterimage. Three typical cognitive distortions are the Ponzo, Poggendorff, and Müller-Lyer illusion. Physical illusions are caused by the physical environment, e.g. by the optical properties of water. Physiological illusions arise in the eye or the visual pathway, e.g. from the effects of excessive stimulation of a specific receptor type. Cognitive visual illusions are the result of unconscious inferences and are perhaps those most widely known.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is an optical illusion consisting of three stylized arrows. When viewers are asked to place a mark on the figure at the midpoint, they tend to place it more towards the "tail" end. The illusion was devised by Franz Carl Müller-Lyer (1857–1916), a German sociologist, in 1889.
Mach bands is an optical illusion named after the physicist Ernst Mach. It exaggerates the contrast between edges of the slightly differing shades of gray, as soon as they contact one another, by triggering edge-detection in the human visual system.
The Cornsweet illusion, also known as the Craik–O'Brien–Cornsweet illusion or the Craik–Cornsweet illusion, is an optical illusion that was described in detail by Tom Cornsweet in the late 1960s. Kenneth Craik and Vivian O'Brien had made earlier observations in a similar vein.
The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.
Semir Zeki FMedSci FRS is a British and French neurobiologist who has specialised in studying the primate visual brain and more recently the neural correlates of affective states, such as the experience of love, desire and beauty that are generated by sensory inputs within the field of neuroesthetics. He was educated at University College London (UCL) where he was Henry Head Research Fellow of the Royal Society before being appointed Professor of Neurobiology. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Neuroesthetics at UCL.
Binocular rivalry is a phenomenon of visual perception in which perception alternates between different images presented to each eye.
The Ternus illusion, also commonly referred to as the Ternus Effect is an illusion related to human visual perception involving apparent motion. In a simplified explanation of one form of the illusion, two discs, are shown side by side as the first frame in a sequence of three frames. Next a blank frame is presented for a very short, variable duration. In the final frame, two similar discs are then shown in a shifted position. Depending on various factors including the time intervals between frames as well as spacing and layout, observers perceive either element motion, in which L appears to move to R while C remains stationary or they report experiencing group motion, in which L and C appear to move together to C and R. Both element motion and group motion can be observed in animated examples to the right in Figures 1 and 2.
Multistable perception is a perceptual phenomenon in which an observer experiences an unpredictable sequence of spontaneous subjective changes. While usually associated with visual perception, multistable perception can also be experienced with auditory and olfactory percepts.
The Hering illusion is one of the geometrical-optical illusions and was discovered by the German physiologist Ewald Hering in 1861. When two straight and parallel lines are presented in front of radial background, the lines appear as if they were bowed outwards. The Orbison illusion is one of its variants, while the Wundt illusion produces a similar, but inverted effect.
The motion aftereffect (MAE) is a visual illusion experienced after viewing a moving visual stimulus for a time with stationary eyes, and then fixating a stationary stimulus. The stationary stimulus appears to move in the opposite direction to the original stimulus. The motion aftereffect is believed to be the result of motion adaptation.
The checker shadow illusion is an optical illusion published by Edward H. Adelson, professor of vision science at MIT in 1995.
The Chubb illusion is an optical illusion or error in visual perception in which the apparent contrast of an object varies substantially to most viewers depending on its relative contrast to the field on which it is displayed. These visual illusions are of particular interest to researchers because they may provide valuable insights in regard to the workings of human visual systems.
Dale Purves is Geller Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences where he remains Research Professor with additional appointments in the department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and the department of Philosophy at Duke University. He earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1960 and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1964. After further clinical training as a surgical resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital, service as a Peace Corps physician, and postdoctoral training at Harvard and University College London, he was appointed to the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in 1973. He came to Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Duke Medical Center, and was subsequently Director of Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (2003-2009) and also served as the Director of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore (2009-2013).
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) refer to the relationships between mental states and neural states and constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the materialist assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components are necessary to produce it.
Scene statistics is a discipline within the field of perception. It is concerned with the statistical regularities related to scenes. It is based on the premise that a perceptual system is designed to interpret scenes.
Mark Changizi is an American theoretical cognitive scientist. He is known for his research on evolutionary origins of biological and cognitive design, including the "Perceiving the present" hypothesis to understand optical illusions, the "Nature-Harnessing" theory for the origins of writing, speech and music, the skin-signaling hypothesis for the origins of primate red-green vision, and the rain-tread hypothesis for pruney fingers.
Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.