Name: The Image You Can Only See Once
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T18:51:41.000Z
Duration: 6 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

Now only some people can see this image or understand this sentence.

To-infinitive

For most people, both seem random and confusing, but by the end of this video, you will be able to see this image and understand that sentence based on new theories of how consciousness works.

Also write in the comments below what you think this sentence is saying.

As by the end of the video, what you wrote will give you an interesting clue into who you are as a person.

It was only in the late 1800s that the scientific study of consciousness began.

By studying animal brains and patients with epilepsy, humans started to understand that electrical signals in the brain send and process information and these neural pathways are likely leading to our sentient consciousness.

But even now, scientists are still trying to grapple with how our consciousness is formed.

Like our brain, this jelly-like organ sealed in our skull away from everything in complete silence and darkness is what creates our ability to hear and see things.

We know that outside of you, there is a reality that exists.

Outside of your body and mind is a world full of real materials and objects.

And our complex bodies use our senses as windows per se to observe, touch, smell, hear, and detect the real world around us.

And don't ever let someone tell you you only have five senses.

You have proprioception, which is the sense of your body's position.

You have thermoception, the sense of temperature and heat that your body is able to pick up.

So using our senses, we convey the information about the world around us to the brain where complex electrical signals process and read the information and create our perceptions leading to consciousness.

You, a person looking at a coffee cup, your sense of vision gathering the information to send to the brain where it does all the work to understand, ooh, yay, that is a coffee cup.

But if this were fully true, you'd be able to see this image and hear this sentence.

And this is where a new theory of consciousness comes in to try and explain what's going on.

There is contemporary thought saying that the brain is actually constantly making predictions based on knowledge and context of the world around you.

And your senses are only there to tie these predictions to reality.

Known as perception error minimization, your senses are just confirming what your brain has already predicted.

Visually, it would look something like this.

Your brain is predicting to see a coffee cup and your senses are just backing up what your brain already predicted with the sense of vision.

If you make a cup of coffee, then you put it down on a table.

Next time you look at it, your brain predicts probably there's gonna be a coffee cup there and then your vision is there to back it up.

This helps you control your perception of the world.

Our brain is a predicting making machine so much so that there are even times where the predictions get in the way of reality.

This illusion is a great example called Adelson's checkerboard.

Your perception of greatness is not due to actual sensory input or you would be able to tell that these tiles are actually the same color.

Since your brain is relying on past knowledge and context of how shadows work, you see these tiles as separate colors.

And even when you know they are the same color, if you go back with the shadows, you still can't really unsee it.

Your brain is a prediction making machine that can't fix itself in this moment.

This means that this illusion is cognitively impenetrable.

Now let's look at the image from the beginning of the video.

You don't have any knowledge or context of this image, which is why you can't see it.

But it is actually a two-tone image of a woman kissing a horse.

She's obviously into some interesting things with her life.

But now when we go back to this image, you can likely make out what it is now.

The sensory input of this image has not changed at all.

The only thing that has changed is your brain's predictions based on knowledge and context, which now changes what you consciously see.

Now, the sentence that I played for you is just a sentence with the high frequencies taken out.

Without any context, it has very R2-D2 energy.

You can't really understand what is being said.

Now let's play the real sentence for you.

And we play the original audio and you now can hear it.

There's a lot of contemporary science now that our consciousness is much more controlled by our brain's predictions based on the context of our lives.

So when you go and look at the comments of what you thought that sentence was or what other people thought, it might give insight into the context of your life.

For example, many people in call centers thought that the sentence was saying, who is calling you?

Maybe that's something that they were just used to hearing a lot.

Or they're just constantly thinking about picking up the phone.

Me obsessed with understanding how consciousness works because consciousness is my whole entire life.

So this information to me has honestly changed my whole perspective on everything.

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