Mind

13 breaks

Psychology, perception and the quirks of the brain.

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Why the same circle looks smaller among big ones: the Ebbinghaus illusion and size contrast Two identical orange circles, one ringed by big circles and one by small ones, and your eyes insist they differ. That is the Ebbinghaus illusion: your visual… Mind4 min read Why real coin flips look fake: streaks and the way we imagine randomness Ask people to write down 100 random coin flips and they almost never include a streak of six, yet a real coin makes one about four times in five. Our gut… Mind4 min read Why still rocks creep upward after you stare at a waterfall: the motion aftereffect Stare at a waterfall, then look at the rocks beside it, and they seem to crawl upward. They go nowhere, yet they move. This is the motion aftereffect, noticed… Mind3 min read Why you stumble naming the ink of a clashing colour word: the Stroop effect Name the ink colour of the word GREEN printed in red and you stumble, even though the rule is trivial. In 1935 John Ridley Stroop timed it: naming the ink of… Mind3 min read Why a dot vanishes when you look away from it: the blind spot where the optic nerve exits Close one eye, stare at a cross, and a dot a hand's width away simply vanishes. That is your blind spot: the place where the optic nerve leaves each eye, with… Mind4 min read Why a falling ruler slips through your fingers: gravity as a reaction-time stopwatch Drop a ruler without warning and you will not catch it at the top. The place where your fingers close is a stopwatch reading: the distance it fell is ½ g t²… Mind4 min read Why you forget most of it in days: Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve In the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus learned lists of nonsense syllables, tested himself after delays from 20 minutes to 31 days, and drew the first forgetting… Mind4 min read Why a blink of blank screen hides big changes: change blindness Show someone two nearly identical pictures with a blink of blank screen between them, and a large change can stay hidden for many seconds. This is change… Mind4 min read Why you can't hold 12 digits but can hold 3 years: working memory chunks Try to hold 149217891945 in your head and it slips away. Read it as 1492, 1789, 1945 and it sticks. The digits are the same; the number of things to hold is… Mind3 min read Why you can't ignore the word and name the colour: the Stroop effect Read the word, then name its ink colour: you can't turn reading off. In 1886 Cattell noticed that people read words faster than they name colours, and in 1935… Mind4 min read Every eye has a hole in its vision, and your brain paints over it Every one of your eyes has a hole in its vision, about ten Moons wide, and you have never seen it. It is where the optic nerve leaves the retina, a patch with… Mind3 min read Why one more candle lights a dark room but vanishes in a bright one Add one candle to a dark room and everything changes. Add one to a room with a hundred and nobody notices. Your senses don't measure differences in amounts… Mind5 min read