Short Wave - Can You See What I See?

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

Everyone sees the world differently. Exactly which colors you see and which of your eyes is doing more work than the other as you read this text is different for everyone. Also different? Our blind spots – both physical and social. As we continue celebrating Black History Month, today we're featuring Exploratorium Staff Physicist Educator Desiré Whitmore. She shines a light on human eyesight – how it affects perception and how understanding another person's view of the world can offer us a fuller, better picture of life. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, shortwavers, Regina Barbara here. And as we continue to celebrate Black History Month, I want to revisit my conversation with physicist Desiree Whitmore. Enjoy. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Supnerds, Emily Kwong here with news from the Shortwave Cosmos. Our universe is expanding, and we are welcoming to the fam, our very first scientist in residence.

That's right. She is astrophysicist and all around incredible human, Regina Barber. Hey, I'm. Regina, we are so excited you're here, the whole team at Shortwave, all of our listeners. We welcome you. Tell us about yourself. I'm super excited to be here, too. I'm a trained astrophysicist.

I've been in academia my whole adult life until now. I taught for over a decade physics and astronomy. And as a female scientist who is Asian and Mexican-American, I noticed I see the world a little differently from a lot of my colleagues and peers whose identities are more common in the sciences. One thing I love about you is you were doing shortwave way before shortwave ever existed in that you created your very own science podcast years ago called Spark Science, which was about this very thing, how your identity can inform the way you do science. Yeah, it's literally true. We all see things differently. And Desire Whitmore says that's pretty typical. I realized that when I was back in graduate school. When I was teaching kids about rainbows and optics and light, I was realizing that, well, some kids are colorblind and they don't even see the colors the way I see them.

Right. Some kids don't see shapes the way I see them and even some adults. And so I realized that people are coming into every situation with a totally different viewpoint. Desire's a physics educator at the Exploratorium. out in San Francisco, and she says how we humans perceive the world around us is different from person to person. Yeah, I heard you called up Desiree recently to demonstrate this very thing. I did, and I was joined by Stephanie O'Neill and Rebecca Ramirez, our editor and producer

for this episode. And we had Desiree walk us through a demonstration that listeners can actually do it home. Amazing. Yeah, all they need is some string or maybe a phone charger, whatever they have on hand, that's at least as long as their arm. So the idea is you put one right at your nose, right in between your eyeballs, and then you hold it out with your other arm as far out as you can go. I have short arms, so it's not very far. Yeah, me too.

Yeah. And I just want you to tell me, like, what do you notice? What do you see when you look at the string? When we did it, we had a whole range of answers. I see a V. You see a V? I see a V too. However, however, if I'd focus closer to my nose on the string, I see an X.

Right. But if I look down to my fingers, I see a V. Ah, okay. I see like an X where there are... Really? Yeah, and they're kind of like ghosts. This is classic shortwave. It has to be this. And so the beautiful thing about that is that I just asked you what you notice. And you all gave me honest answers, hopefully. Right. I'm a compulsive liar.

That's a lie. That in itself is a lie. This speaks it true. Anyway. Yeah, it's alive. Totally. And this parallel between everyone's different lived experiences and their different eyesight is exactly what Desiree teaches. Oh, cool.

She runs workshops designed to help science teachers be more attuned to their students and to ask them more open-ended questions. If I ask you, what do you notice? You don't have to know the answer. The answer is whatever it is that you notice. Right. And it's different. Everyone sees something different. And how they describe that experience.

is going to be different from the words that they use all the time. Exactly. And so that's a beautiful part about education, at least, right? When we're thinking about how do we teach students, science, how do we get them interested in the science? A big part of that is letting them be themselves in science, seeing themselves in the science. Today on the show, the world through Regina and Desire's eyes. Desire tells me all about human eyesight and how understanding another person's view of the world can unlock a fuller and better picture. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber. One, two, three. You're listening to Shortwave,

the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. So Desiree, we just did the experiment and we each had little variations like each of us saw the string differently. What actually is happening in our brains or in our eyes to have that happen? Oh, well, I mean, everyone's eyeballs are different. And so is your brain. So like the connection between your eye and brain is different. So most seeing people have a dominant eye versus a non-dominant eye. So some people when you're doing this activity will only see one string. They won't see two. Or sometimes it looks ghosty, as you were saying, which means one of them is harder to see than the other. What else, like, scientifically is happening with people seeing things differently? So your eyeball has different components in it. There are two lenses. One's

called a cornea. One's called a lens. And then you have just this squishy, fluid in there. And then on the back of your eyeball, you have what's called a retina, which is where all of the cells that allow you to detect light live. And so light goes through your lens, focuses through your eye, and projects onto that retina. And then there's this one spot at the bottom of the retina that is your blind spot. That's where the optic nerve is. Okay. The optic nerve is basically the cable that takes the signals from your eyeball all the way back to your brain. And the place where the optic nerve connects to your eyeball, that doesn't have any detector cells on it. All you have is this optic nerve.

And so that is your blind spot. That makes so much sense. And in your workshop, you help people find their own physical blind spot in their eyes. People usually do this with an index card, but we're going to use your presentation slides. Can you take us through that exercise? Oh, yeah, absolutely. On the left you have a cross and on the right you have a dot. And so I want you to close your left eye and with your right eye look at the cross and then move your face closer to and farther from your computer and tell me what happened.

Oh, my God. It just disappears. What disappears? So I'm looking at the cross and there's a dot a little to the right. And when I back up a little bit, all of a sudden it's gone. and then I keep on backing up and it reappears. Yeah. In my peripheral vision.

Yeah. So you might say, you know, this is a white screen with black dots. So maybe it's just this black and white thing. And so here's another one. And it's a picture of a sunset. So there's a bright yellow sun on the right with some mountains in the foreground. And then you have a black cross. And so in this one, you want to close your right eye.

And with your left eye, look at the black cross on the right. and again, move your face farther to and closer to the computer. Oh, my God. Yep. Right? So what happened? So I'm looking at the cross and when I back up, there's one point in which I can't see the sun in my peripheral vision unless I move my eye. It looks the same like it fills in the space with just the rest of the sky.

Yeah. It's not just a blank spot. It's like actually filled in with the colors and the texture that was there. Oh, instead of that sun. Yeah. Okay. And so physical blind spots, we all have them, but our brains fill in the missing information. And you relate all of this to social blind spots in your workshop.

Yeah, so I connect it to social blind spots in the sense that I think about how everyone who can see has a blind spot. But we kind of just live our everyday life, not thinking about them. And I like to say that socially we also have blind spots, right? There are always these things that we might think about other people or other things or situations, and our brain actually fills in the necessary information for us. But our brain doesn't necessarily know the right information to fill. And it's very helpful when there are predators around, right? It helps us figure out what's around us and what our surroundings are so that we can make smart decisions and survive.

But then there are cases where maybe if we are teachers and we're dealing with people in our classroom, right, we might make assumptions about those students that are not necessarily true because our brain knows to do that. It's like, oh, I don't know this person's background. I don't know where they came from. But in my head, I can make one up real quick, you know, because of the way they look, I can make these associations. But the information is not actually factual. It's just something that my brain has decided to believe. Yeah, and these associations we use to fill in those gaps makes me think of the role of like speech and language and how they affect social blind spots. Like all this is really complex.

There's even differences in how we communicate what we're seeing. Yes. If we're dealing with people, you have to actually ask people. What do they see? I don't know what you're going to see until you describe it to me. I don't want to give away the answer. I want to know what you notice. I want to know what you wonder, right?

I want to know how this connects to your lived experiences so that as we move forward, I better understand how to speak your language and to fill in your blind spots. We can kind of come together to create this shared language to describe what science is and shared language about the phenomena that we're looking at. Yeah, I really, really like this workshop because the equity is like embedded in these science lessons. Like, I mean, is that the hope that you can like kind of show people that there are many. science lessons that you can use and equity lessons or inclusion lessons are already there. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's about showcasing it so that teachers can understand that equity is not this totally different thing that you have to like step away from the curriculum to teach. Equity is and should be a part of your science. Diversity is a part of your science and always should be,

And so helping teachers to understand how to make those connections has become a really important part of my work. So when you're doing these workshops, what kind of reactions do you get? Oh, it's quite a range. I mean, most people are quite blown away when they first recognize their blind spot, right? Their physical blind spot. They get very like, oh, my gosh, I can't. Like you did. You were so excited, right?

But then when I start making this connection to equity and to, you know, social blind spots, all have people just like, oh, my gosh, I've never thought about that. I've never thought about the fact that the person sitting right next to me, maybe even my child, they see the world in a different way than I see the world. And so my hope is that through my work, I can help people understand the humanity of everyone, else and the fact that humanity is so incredibly diverse. And this idea that like equity is not an end goal, it's a process. You should always be continuously improving to be more equitable. And so that's why I constantly try to make these connections so that more and more people

can understand the world and teach the youth of tomorrow, you know, to be more equitable and be more appreciative of their neighbor humans. Desiree, thank you so much for coming on this show. And I really appreciate you giving us the time and sharing all this awesome wisdom with us. Thank you so much. I appreciate your appreciation of the work that I'm doing. Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Stephanie O'Neill and fact-checked by Catherine Seifer. Giselle Grayson is our senior supervising editor.

Andrea Kisick is the head of the science desk. Edith Chapin is the executive editor and vice president. of News, Nancy Barnes is our Senior Vice President of News. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.