Category Archives: Seeing

Transplanted corneas are a window to the soul

December 15, 2011 – 2:44 pm

A fascinating note on the social meaning of eyes and why people are much more reluctant to donate the cornea after death than other bodily organs. From a recent article in the journal Transplanatation: At the time that a patient is diagnosed as brain dead, a substantial proportion of families who give consent to heart [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (7)

Food for thought

December 7, 2011 – 12:58 am

  Life-sized edible brain sculptures from a series called ‘What have you got in your head?’ by artist Sara Asnaghi.   Link to full sculpture series (via BoingBoing).

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Nonsense | Comments (3)

Elvis in potato chip neuroscience

November 20, 2011 – 2:01 pm

A new study just published in Cerebral Cortex on the neuroscience on how we see meaningful information in unpatterned visual scenes, seems a little fixated on Elvis. The study concludes: Future studies of the neural processing relevant to pareidolia and to meaning more generally may provide novel insights into how the organization of conceptual processing [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (8)

The dreams and hallucinations of cloistered monks

November 17, 2011 – 1:44 am

French sleep scientists have studied a group of monks who have virtually no contact with the outside world and have taken a vow of silence. The monks are of scientific interest owing to the tradition of having two sleep periods per night interrupted by a 2-3 hour prayer and psalm reading session. The research group [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating | Comments (4)

A history of the mid-life crisis

October 5, 2011 – 12:07 am

Scientific American’s Bering in Mind has a fantastic article on how the concept of the mid-life crisis was invented and whether it has any evidence behind it beyond the occasional inadvisable pair of cycling shorts and sudden interest in cheesy sports cars. It turns out that the idea of the ‘mid-life crisis’ is surprisingly new [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (5)

Game not over

September 27, 2011 – 3:36 am

The Guardian covers a new study on how video games can persist in our perception as fleeting hallucinations in an effect labelled ‘game transfer phenomena’. Unfortunately, the study has been published in an obscure journal which means I’ve not been able to read it in full, although the write-up quotes the lead researcher, Mark Griffiths: [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating | Comments (12)

Your face in every flower

August 14, 2011 – 11:56 pm

Billie Holiday sings about the phenomenon of seeing meaningful patterns in vague or non-connected visual information in her well-known track The Very Thought of You Scientifically, these effects are known as pareidolia or apophenia. However, the song notes that the perceptual biases are induced by love and, of course, ‘The Very Thought of You’. I [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (6)

Inner visions of seven dimensional space

August 6, 2011 – 1:51 pm

I’ve just found an amazing 2002 article [pdf] from the American Mathematical Society about blind mathematicians. I was surprised to learn that the majority work in geometry, supposedly the most ‘visual’ discipline, and fascinated to learn that they generally believe the experience of sight puts people at a disadvantage because it locks us into a [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating, Reasoning | Comments (11)

In search of invisible violence

June 23, 2011 – 3:15 am

NPR Radio covers an amazing inattentional blindness experiment that investigated how easy it is to miss a vicious beating in the street – after a policemen was convicted of ignoring an attack during a pursuit. Inattentional blindness is the phenomenon where we don’t notice something seemingly obvious because we are paying attention to some other [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (5)

About face

June 19, 2011 – 10:55 pm

An amazing picture from Jeff Arris that plays havoc with our face perception system – grabbed from Twitter and which lives on Flickr here. If anyone knows the attribution for the piece do let me know. Thanks to commenter gsggs for finding the attribution.

By vaughanbell | Comments (8)

Alice through the crooked glass

June 2, 2011 – 11:39 pm

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a fascinating study where participants felt they were the size of a doll or had expanded to giant proportions simply by using a headset, a camera and a bit of foot stroking. In a typical experiment, a volunteer is being stroked while wearing a virtual reality headset. She’s lyng down [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating | Comments (1)

Hearing the voices of colours

April 12, 2011 – 11:06 pm

A spectacular case of psychosis, rather oddly described as ‘Methamphetamine Induced Synesthesia’, in a case report just published in The American Journal on Addictions. The report concerns a 30-year-old gentleman from the Iranian city of Shiraz with a long-standing history of drug use who recently started smoking crystal: Six months PTA [prior to admission] (October [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Hearing and Language, Integrating | Comments (3)

Poetic sensitivities

December 27, 2010 – 7:29 pm

Perceptual psychologists have long been interested in limen – the threshold at which a stimulus becomes detectable. The following limen for the different senses, expressed in everyday terms rather than in terms of physical quantities, have a certain poetry to them. I got this information via email as a scan of an (unknown to me) [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in Hearing and Language | Comments (10)

A misperceptive critic

November 24, 2010 – 7:16 pm

It’s not often that hallucinations indulge in media criticism, but this case of Charles Bonnet syndrome recently published in the journal Optometry is a delightful exception. Everyone, it seems, is a critic, including perceptual distortions generated by, in this case, macular degeneration. A 79-year-old man presented to the clinic with intermittent hallucinations of 6 months’ [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (2)

An illusory tribute

November 17, 2010 – 4:27 pm

Richard Gregory was a much loved and hugely influential perceptual psychologist who passed away earlier this year. Tom just alerted me to a wonderfully appropriate visual palindrome on his page of remembrance where his name reads perfectly well when either the ‘right way up’ on when ‘turned on its head’. If you can’t see it [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (3)

The vision thing

October 27, 2010 – 2:15 am

The ever-interesting Oliver Sacks is interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air where he discusses cases from his new book on the extremes of visual perception. If you’re a fan of Sacks’ work, like me, this programme is an absolute treat as the conversation ranges from the science of misrecognition to his own quite recent experiences of [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Leave a Comment
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