How to Explore Your Brain

Friday 1 February 2013 0 comments


1 Seeing doesn't believe
TAKE a moment to observe the world around you. Scan the horizon with your eyes. Tilt your head back and listen. You’re probably getting the impression that your senses are doing a fine job of capturing everything that is going on. Yet that is all it is: an impression.

2 This is not my nose
YOU may know the crossed-hands illusion. Hold your arms out in front of you and cross them over, rotate your hands so your palms face each other, then mesh your fingers together. Now slowly rotate your hands up between your arms so you’re staring at your knuckles. Ask someone to point to one of your index fingers, then attempt to move it. Did you move the wrong one?

3 A brain of two halves
WOULD you consider yourself to be logical and analytical or creative and empathic? According to popular psychology you’re one or the other, and it’s all down to which half of your brain you use the most: the rational and calculating left or the intuitive, artistic right.

4 Probe your subconscious
IT WAS a ground-breaking investigation into the nature of consciousness and free will. In 1983, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, hooked five volunteers up to an EEG machine and asked them to make voluntary movements, such as lifting a finger, whenever they felt like it. Watching the electrical activity in their brains, he discovered that his subjects only became consciously aware of their intention to act a few hundred milliseconds after their brain had initiated the movement. Libet was forced to conclude that what feels like a conscious decision may in fact be nothing of the sort.

5 Pay attention!
IMAGINE you are walking down the street and a passer-by asks you for directions. As you talk to him, two workmen rudely barge between you carrying a door. Then something weird happens: in the brief moment that the passer-by is behind the door, he switches places with one of the workmen. You are left giving directions to a different person who is taller, wearing different clothes and has a different voice. Do you think you would notice?

6 Made-up m emories
A FEW years ago, the actor Alan Alda visited a group of memory researchers at the University of California, Irvine, for a TV show he was making. During a picnic lunch, one of the scientists offered Alda a hard-boiled egg. He turned it down, explaining that as a child he had made himself sick eating too many eggs.

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