Hofstadter's Road Sign: I noticed that when I looked at the dots I saw them as switching or just going up and down. However, when I changed the object to arrows it looked as though they were chasing each other in the direction I chose. The last thing I tried was changing the colors of the dots. This was similar to the arrows because the colors switched to where it looked like they were chasing after one another. I was surprised at how something so little like color or what the object even is, could have an impact on what you see or how you see it. I'm not quite sure off hand how this could be applied to everyday life. I'm sure there is something though that could come up.
Ambiguous Figures: In this activity I found it fun to see what else the picture could be. In one of the pictures shown, it can be a skull or a lady looking at herself in a mirror. It's so odd to see how a picture can be more than one thing if you just look at it a different way. I wasn't necessarily surprised by anything just impressed at how nifty the picture in a picture thing goes. How do people come up with it? How do they do it?
As for daily life, I would say maybe if you ever see art exhibits you would see portraits like that. All I know for sure is I wish I could make stuff like that, not gonna lie.
The Game of Life: This game was a little challenging to get. At first I just put a random amount of green dots in a certain amount of dots. I didn't add any more from the original and I pressed the one time button to see what happens. In the end I found out that the green dots eventually just die off. However, I took the same amount of green dots and red dots as before but after a certain amount of times I pressed the one time button I added one or two green dots. I saw by continuing on that way that the green dots still survive and don't die off. That's when I actually understood the game and what it's about. It was a way of showing that if a population starts in random areas and doesn't continue populating it will die off. It makes sense but at first I personally didn't catch on to that for this game.
I don't really know how accurate this game really is, personally I believe it isn't that precise. However, it is a good animation for understanding the basics of population and the surrounding environment on a population. Also to show how we are dependent on populating for our survival, just have to make sure we don't over populate.
Free Will: You see a picture of green arrows pointing right, or yellow arrows pointing left. Which do you see is more or less the question asked here? This activity was similar to the Ambiguous Figures one, except they added a twist to it. You are supposed to think to yourself which arrow you wanted to see, green or yellow. You then press go and see what you saw first. If you saw what you wanted to you have free will, meaning you controlled what you wanted to see and didn't let anything else alter that. It's a little out of the box but still quite interesting I thought. This one I have a great favor for because I believe in mind over matter. If you tell yourself you will see a certain thing, more than likely you will see it. In my opinion a lot of things coincide with that. One example I commonly think of would be hypochondriacs. They believe they are sick and their body feels as though they are sick, but in reality nothing is wrong. We only use ten percent of our brains, so one can only think at how powerful the entirety of it is.
These activities helped me to look at the world in more than one way. To look at both sides of the story you could say. As for the unit, I learned quite a bit about the brain and neurons, where there located, what they are called, etc. Knowing now how everything works together and how everything is connected so complexly, I realize that there is so much more to the understanding of a human than I previously thought. Our brain and everything about us is utterly amazing. I doubt we will ever fully comprehend a lot about ourselves.
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