Just an illusion?

The study of human perception is not easy, but it can be a lot of fun. How do we know for example, that we all represent reality in the same way? How do I know that my perception of the colour blue is the same as yours? We can't really know for certain. Human perception has its limitations, and we can be highly suggestible. Human perception is absolutely fascinating, and studying the processes by which we represent reality through our senses is completely engaging. Some of my digital literacy students discovered how thoroughly absorbing it can be to learn about perception this week. I took them on a brief tour of cognitive processes, including the human senses, memory and recall, and the representation of reality through perception. I showed how these processes connect up into cognitive architectures, through an analysis of the biological, psychological and physiological.

I showed them some optical illusions and got them to solve some lateral thinking problems. Then I demonstrated for them the most dangerous thing I have ever done in a live classroom setting. It involves a full can of baked beans and my index finger. It is quite stressful for all concerned, especially me, because if I get it wrong, I can severely damage my hand. (I might never play the guitar again!) I ask the students to decide whether what they are seeing is actually an illusion, or reality. The video of a previous demonstration is below:


I also showed them a video of the American illusionist David Copperfield disappearing the Statue of Liberty in front of a live audience. It is an astounding trick, and fools just about everyone who sees it. The video of the stunt, below, is absolutely breathtaking to watch, and full of showmanship, as you would expect from David Copperfield (no relation to the Charles Dickens character of the same name). I then told the students how it was done, and it all seemed just a little more mundane. I wasn't trying to ruin the magical effect of the illusion, merely showing them that much of life - just like all of the so called 'magic tricks' we see on our TVs - can be illusory, and many surprising phenomena can actually be explained rationally.



What teachers do in the classroom is a little like the illusionists. They not only perform in front of an audience, but there are elements within their act that can change students' perceptions of reality. What is it to have to unlearn and relearn something? It can be difficult to accept that you have been proved wrong, when you have believed something for so long. What happens to a child's confidence when they are told they are absolutely brilliant at doing something? And what would be the result if several 'average' children were singled out as 'very bright' students and then lavished with attention and praise? The latter actually happened in an experiment conducted by the psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson in the late 1960s, and was subsequently known as Pygmalion in the Classroom (after the George Bernard Shaw play in which a street urchin was transformed into a socialite). The illusion was that the children were chosen at random (usually with average IQ scores) but were hailed as 'highly intelligent'. The reality was that when the researchers returned to measure progress, the singled out children had indeed improved their IQ scores, and had risen above the rest of the class to become the highest achievers.

The effect of teachers believing that certain students are bright, whilst others are less intelligent often results in a self-fulfilling prophecy. The representation of the illusion becomes a reality, and the children who are considered bright, achieve more highly than those who have been told they are less bright. This is a salutary lesson for all teachers. Your decisions will shape the destiny of your students. When students are made to feel intelligent and capable, that is what they become. Are you changing illusions into reality?

Photo by Ian Stannard


Just an illusion? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.