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.
Image Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1044600
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