Horizon: Is Seeing Believing? - Carte blanche BBC

Directed by

Naomi Austin

Produced by

BBC / Diff : RTBF

Documentary, United Kingdom, 2010, 50 min

Is Seeing Believing? explores the strange and wonderful world of illusions – and reveals the tricks they play on our senses and why they fool us.

The film shows how easy it is to trick our sense of taste by changing the colours of food and drink, explains how what we see can change what we hear, and just how unreliable our sense of colour can be. But all this trickery has a serious purpose. It’s helping scientists to create a new understanding of how our senses work - not as individual senses, but connected together. It holds the intriguing possibility that one sense could be mapped into another. This is what happened to Daniel Kish, who lost his sight as a child. He is now able to create a vision of the world by clicking his tongue which allows him to echolocate like a bat. And in a series of MRI scans, scientists are now looking to find out if Daniel's brain may have actually rewired itself enabling him to use sound to create a visual image of the world.

Debate with :

• Aidan Laverty, BBC Horizon program officer
• Jean-Pol Tassin, pathophysiology of addiction and relapse, research director at Inserm