Students appear to believe that "seeing" must be emitted by their eyes in order to see themselves in the mirror. Some believe that this must be activated by light from, say a ceiling light to work. Some believe that light bouncing off a foot to the mirror must be met by seeing emitted by the eye to that point on a mirror.
The best that I have been able to achieve is reducing this response to 12 or 15% of the students in a General Education course. (By the way, without directly addressing this, close to 30% of students in a Pre-Med physics course exhibit this belief.)
My constraints are that I need to be able to serve a class of 60 students, and time is somewhat limited.
(12%? good grief - that's a vast number for such a strange idea!)
So.
Why can they not see in the dark?
Why is this 'seeing' effect not detectable by *any* instrument?
Why does the eye not radiate anything (other than infra-red body heat)?
How do inanimate cameras see?
I'd suggest a comparative dissection of an inanimate camera and a mammalian eye (we took apart cow's eyes in biology - not the best approach for 60 folk perhaps).
Point out the absence of any 'seeing' organ - and the presence of a photoreceptive screen.
Perhaps a good experiment could be the following.
Take a book with some words written with high letters and give it to one of the students showing it in front of the mirror. Ask him and also other students that read it. They shall find that something has changed and it would be very interesting to ask them the reason of such change.
@ Nielson. I am little confused by your statement, "Seeing" must be emitted by their eyes......., why eyes? Could you pl. clarify?
Hi Ryan...this would seem to me to have a simple fix. As part of a sensory receptor system, visual information still requires "processing". This processing can be accessed by asking anyone to close their eyes and "'see' themselves on a beach". The 'beach' accessed is the "representational trace" that remains after the response-to apparatus in the eye structure, interacts with the environmental stimulus. This is pretty good evidence that we "absorb and process" rather than emit. HTH. D
There was a time when your students' belief would be considered reasonable. A very brief history of this controversy, which at least will give you some names to Google to learn more, is the first paragraph of "The Two Slit Experiment for Light" section on page 6:
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/DoubleSlit/DoubleSlit.pdf
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