Is seeing believing?.

If only ten percent of the information we use to see comes from our eyes, can we trust our eyes? Using a variety of optical illusions, this documentary presents some fascinating experiments which shed light on perceptual psychology. We see how our eyes are tricked by visual and other stimuli and meet people who suffer from synaesthesia in which the senses become enmeshed so that sounds can be seen and colours can be heard. However, studies which show how colour and sound are crucially important to our appreciation of what we eat, for instance, reveal that we are all synaesthetes, that we all have multi-sensory perception. Furthermore, one sense can be used to replace another. We meet Daniel Kish who is totally blind but able to successfully ride a bike by using tongue clicks to echo locate, like a bat. His extraordinary ability is being studied by Lutz Wiegrebe and Angus Rupert presents an experiment in which a pilot attempts to land a helicopter with his eyes closed.

This documentary

BBC 2, 2010.

1 DVD ( 50 min.) : sound, color, PAL.

Broadcast on 18 October, 2010

Produced and directed by Naomi Austin.

BBC TV