Perception

What knowledge changes your perception of whether or not something is beautiful?

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click here for Richard Seymour’s video - ‘How beauty feels’

Model Dependent Reality???

Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas? This is a great ‘Beginners Guide to Brain Function’.

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Cultural Paradigms

Devdutt Pattanaik looks at the myths of India and of the West. He uses the myths that the two cultures have grown up on to show how these cultural paradigms have affected business and modern life. Well worth a look. Could similarities be drawn between the male and female paradigms? The male paradigm being closer akin to the Western linear ideals and the female paradigm being more cyclical and emotional?
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How do we see things?

Beau Lotto argues that the sensory information that falls in through our eyes is meaningless unless we know how to interpret it. Perception is all important.

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Lessons from an Ad Man - Superb Microeconomics

The wonderful Rory Sutherland wows the audience at the TED conference in Oxford with a superb sixteen minute talk on advertising and aspects of behavioural economics. It is an immensely watchable video that will allow you to discuss with your students concepts such as perceived value, symbolic value,intangible value, hedonic opportunity cost and some ideas for nudging personal behaviour in socially beneficial ways. We learn of the extraordinary value of placebos, the rebranding of the potato in Prussian Germany. That all value is subjective and that persuasion is better than compulsion. Some super examples too of Veblen Goods, price discrimination and how the framing of the Italian penalty points system for drivers in Italy has a different impact than for motorists in the UK.

Hallucinations

Neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses Charles Bonnett Syndrome- when those with visual impairments experience incredibly lucid hallucinations. “We see with the eyes but we also see with the brain ... this is often called imagination .. but there are also hallucinations as well”.
Hallucinations seem to mimic perception. Dr Sacks looks at why they might occur.  Click here for the link

How do we know what other people want?

Rebecca Saxe discusses how the we figure out the needs and desires of others. How do we make moral judgements? Where does empathy come from? Rebecca studies what we think about other people’s thoughts. She considers how we sense the motives of others and tries to answer the age old question - How can we know what others want? Why is it so hard to change what others want or believe?
This is a really interesting look at how the brain judges the actions of others and how this then has an impact upon our moral sense.
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Everything Connects -TOK

Emily Levine talks about science, maths, society and they way that everything connects. As a philosopher/comedian the discussion that results is very funny. Her work, whilst being hilarious, also makes serious connections between hard science and pop culture, between what we say and what we secretly assume.
The content is a little risque in parts- be warned.

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Maths as a Creative Art

There is far more to mathematics than the rigid application of formal rules to meaningless systems of symbols. For some, it is creative, imaginative, deeply satisfying and in some ways similar to those disciplines sometimes considered diametrically opposed to mathematics, the arts.

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What is Language

In My Language highlights the different methods of communication.
The author is autistic and has a different way of communicating with the world. It causes us to ask difficult questions of ourselves.
This is brings into the fore questions about the purpose of language, what is the function of communication as well as highlighting whether words are a necessary part of our interaction with the world.

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Questions on the Truman Show

Question Sheet
Relevant to both the TOK course and the RE AS

The film focusses upon issues of perception and reality, Plato’s Cave,  knowledge and truth.

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TOK Connections Perception/ Knowledge

A stimulus sheet - pictures / buzz words

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Moral Monkeys and Kant

In todays ‘Thought for the Day” Akhandadhi Das spoke about research presented last week to show that Monkeys express empathy and offer help when a fellow animal is in trouble. These findings seem to suggest that animals have a moral sense, thus calling into question the idea that humans are unique. Does this have implications for the Moral Argument as a proof for the existence of God?

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