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For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."

magic perception grue cognitive-science cogsci brain

It should come as no surprise that we don’t notice everything that we see. We all experience this on a regular basis – there is a great deal of visual information in our field of view but we only pay attention to a small fraction of it. Yet at the same time something within our vision can capture our attention if it flashes, moves, or otherwise changes dramatically enough. Interestingly, despite our common and frequent experience with the limitations of our own visual attention, people tend to have overconfidence in their ability to notice details and are often surprised when an important detail goes unnoticed.

change-blindness perception grue

A recurring conundrum in philosophy is the impossibility of sharing, or describing to a blind person, the subjective sensation of colour. Is my sensation of red the same as yours? Or do you see an entirely different hue that I cannot even dream of?

color perception grue

A new computational model sheds light on the workings of the human visual system and could help advance artificial-intelligence research, too.

brain perception recognition AI grue

The Neitzes, with Katherine Mancuso and other colleagues, used the technique of gene therapy to introduce the gene for the missing red pigment into the cone cells of the monkeys’ retinas. Several months after the therapy, Dalton and Sam were able to see a world in which red hues were visible and oranges no longer looked like lemons, the researchers say in the current issue of Nature.

vision color genetics perception grue cogsci

blindsight perception consciousness cogsci

The visual system has limited capacity and cannot process everything that falls onto the retina. Instead, the brain relies on attention to bring salient details into focus and filter out background clutter. Two recent studies by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, one study employing computational modeling techniques and the other experimental techniques, have helped to unravel the mechanisms underlying attention.

brain attention perception cogsci grue

The experience of ‘looking out of the corner of the eye’ using peripheral vision is commonplace but it conceals a unusual fact about attention. That is that we probably spend a lot more of our time than we might imagine with our ‘mind’s eye’ looking in a different direction to our eyeballs. (PsyBlog)

consciousness attention mind cogsci grue perception

How difficult is it to manufacture someone else`s memory? Psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus says it`s a whole lot easier than you might think.

perception memory law cogsci

in list: Neuroethics

If one knows enough about the world, one should know that an oar partly submerged in water (seen from a particular viewing angle) should look bent just like that. (The Splintered Mind)

illusion perception cogsci

Wired Science has an interesting preview of an upcoming study that used hypnosis to induce colour-number synaesthesia in highly hypnotisable participants. (Mind Hacks)

synesthesia brain perception AZB