Field
Mind
What thinking is, and the ways it reliably fails.
24 entries
Memory is a reconstruction
Human episodic memory is not a recording. It is rebuilt at recall and can be systematically distorted.
Judgment has a shape
Human judgment departs from normative logic and probability in systematic, replicable ways — not as random error.
Thought has a narrow desk
Working memory holds only a few items at once — on the order of four chunks in typical adults, not an inner theatre of unlimited space.
You cannot tickle yourself
A self-produced touch is cancelled by a prediction from the cerebellum. The same touch from someone else is not, and it tickles.
There is a hole in your vision
Each eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the retina. There are no photoreceptors there. You do not see the hole.
You go blind every time you look around
During a saccade — the jump of the eye from one point to another — vision is suppressed. You do not see the smear the motion would produce.
A gorilla can cross the room unseen
When attention is spent on a demanding visual task, a person in a gorilla suit can walk through the scene and about half of viewers do not report it.
What you hear depends on what you see
A voice saying “ba”, dubbed onto a face mouthing “ga”, is often heard as “da”. The syllable is a compromise the brain invented.
Some blind people can point at what they cannot see
After damage to the primary visual cortex, some patients report no sight in part of the field and still discriminate location or motion there above chance.
A human eye can catch one photon
Dark-adapted people can detect a single photon in a laboratory, above chance, and their confidence tracks the trials where the photon was actually sent.
You glow, too faintly to see
The human body emits a steady trickle of visible photons, brightest in the late afternoon and strongest on the face. The light is real and far below vision.
Swearing raises the pain threshold
People who repeat a swear word keep a hand in ice water longer than people who repeat a neutral word.
A sugar pill can change the body
Placebo analgesia is partly opioid. A drug that blocks opioid receptors also blocks some of the pain relief of a sham treatment.
Coffee does not give you energy
Caffeine keeps you alert by blocking adenosine receptors. It does not supply energy to the brain. It hides the signal that you have been awake.
Rats laugh when they are tickled
Rats emit ultrasonic chirps near 50 kilohertz during play and tickling. The calls track reward and approach.
Your nostrils take turns
In most people the two sides of the nose alternate congestion across a few hours. One side leads, then the other.
Cold water on the face slows the heart
Submerging the face in cold water, while holding the breath, triggers the mammalian dive reflex: heart rate falls and blood shifts toward the chest.
A memory can be planted
People can be led to remember, with confidence and with sensory detail, an event that never happened.
The brain spends a fifth of the budget
The human brain is about two percent of body mass and, at rest, uses about twenty percent of the body's oxygen and metabolic energy.
A split brain can disagree with itself
When the corpus callosum is cut, the two hemispheres can be shown different things and can give different answers, each missing the other's stimulus.
A missing limb can still hurt
After an amputation, most people feel the limb still present. Many feel pain in it. The sensation is generated by the nervous system, not by tissue that is gone.
For some people, letters have colours
A subset of people experience stable colours for specific letters or numbers. The pairings pass consistency tests years apart. This is synesthesia.
You can miss a change happening in front of you
If a change coincides with a brief interruption — a flicker, a blink, a cut — people often fail to see it, even when it is large.
A dreamer can signal, with eye movements, that the dream is lucid
People trained to notice they are dreaming can, during confirmed REM sleep, make a prearranged pattern of eye movements. The pattern shows up on the recorder. The dream continues.