Teaching and Outreach

Teaching

At NDSU, one of the courses I teach is Sensation & Perception. For several years, I've been working towards centering hands-on experiments in this class with an emphasis on analog materials like lasers, lenses, filters, and paper models students can use to explore key concepts. All of my materials for these demos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/hands-on-vision-science, so please go check them out if you're interested! I'm also always looking for more ideas about cool ways to bring hands-on experimentation into S&P classes so be in touch with ideas you want to share.

Outreach

Besides my usual research and teaching duties at NDSU, I also take part in a number of different outreach activities that give me the opportunity to work with a wide range of different people across North Dakota and beyond. Below are just a few of my favorite examples of work myself and the rest of the Balas Lab have done to share our work with a larger community.

The North Dakota Governor's School Program (discontinued by our Gov.) made it possible for HS students to join the Balas Lab and conduct research during a residential summer experience at NDSU.

The ND EPSCoR-funded NATURE Sunday Academy and NATURE Summer Camp support STEM experiences for students across ND's Tribal Colleges (including the students at Cankdeska Cikana Community College, pictured above).

NDSU's STEM Kids classes have been a great opportunity to teach middle-school students (Grades 6-8) about Vision Science through hands-on experiments and observation.

Media Appearances

On a few occasions I've been fortunate to receive some media coverage of my work. You can find links to some of these appearances below. I also maintain an active chess blog under the username NDPatzer over on chess.com (where I'm a Top Blogger) and at https://lichess.org/@/NDpatzer/blog. Check it out if you're interested in learning more about visual perception and how it applies to chess!

July 2025 - "Chess Streaks, Blunders and Brain Science." This was a great discussion with NM Ben Johnson about some of the topics I've been writing about on my Lichess blog during the first half of 2025. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-444-dr-benjamin-balas-on-chess-streaks-blunders/id1185023674?i=1000719608614

December 2024 - "The Science of Chess Blunders" I was very pleased to be invited to join Dr. Can Cabaydi to talk about the visual cognition of chess blunders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrzblptGNjw&t=58s

May 2021 - My cat will not replicate an effect

This is not me and it's not my work, but it is my cat failing to perform as expected in an ad-hoc version of a fantastic citizen science project about feline perception of illusory contours. https://www.sciencealert.com/cats-don-t-just-like-to-sit-in-real-boxes-they-ll-choose-to-sit-in-illusions-of-boxes-too

March 2021 - "The Fork-and-Knife Illusion Makes Metal Appear Transparent"

Here's a nice write-up of our illusion at Psychology Today. We also got some coverage at Boing-Boing.

December 2020 Neural Correlate Society - "Best Illusion of the Year Contest"

My daughter discovered a simple transparency illusion that we submitted for the annual Illusion of the Year Contest. You can find our entry video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVtyeau4YLc

August 2020 Slate - "A Second Skin."

I was interviewed by Slate during the COVID-19 pandemic to talk about the kind of strange trend of ordering face masks depicting your own face.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/07/mask-of-your-own-face.html

November 2018 - Parsing Science - "Illusions in the Periphery"

I had a great time talking with the folks at the Parsing Science podcast about the work myself and my undergraduate honors student, Hannah Pearson, did on the Flashed Face Distortion Effect.

https://www.parsingscience.org/2018/11/27/ben-balas/

March 2016 - Popular Science - "Why is Ted Cruz's Face a Meme?"

Back in 2016, Senator Ted Cruz's possible resemblance to a wide range of increasingly bizarre famous and not-super-famous people became a bit of a social media event. Popular Science asked me to comment on it.

http://www.popsci.com/why-does-ted-cruzs-face-look-like-so-many-other-people

March 2015 - NDSU Spectrum - "The Colorful Conundrum: NDSU Professor addresses 'The Dress."

Our campus newspaper asked me to talk a bit about #TheDress for what turned into a rather nice write-up of the phenomenon and people's responses to it.

/http://ndsuspectrum.com/the-colorful-conundrum-ndsu-professor-addresses-the-dress/