Category Archives: Seeing

Hallucinating sheet music

March 30, 2013 – 11:06 am

Oliver Sacks has just published an article on ‘Hallucinations of musical notation’ in the neurology journal Brain that recounts eight cases of illusory sheet music escaping into the world. The article makes the interesting point that the hallucinated musical notation is almost always nonsensical – either unreadable or not describing any listenable music – as […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (5)

A retrospective editing of consciousness

January 24, 2013 – 9:11 pm

A new study has found that conscious experience can be altered retrospectively, so that experience of visual information can be changed almost half a second later by manipulating where our attention is drawn. The research, led by cognitive scientist Claire Sergent, involved asking people to stare at a centre point of a screen with two […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (14)

Hallucinations caused by lightning

September 12, 2012 – 9:47 pm

A 23-year-old mountain climber was hit by a lightning bolt and awoke in hospital to find herself experiencing bizarre hallucinations. The case, reported in BMJ Case Reports, describes how the healthy young woman was mountaineering with her climbing partner when they heard heard cracking thunder and were thrown to the ground by a massive shockwave. […]

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

Deaf police to monitor security cameras in Mexico

September 8, 2012 – 8:54 am

Deaf police officers have been recruited to monitor security cameras in the Mexican city of Oaxaca because of their ‘heightened visual abilities’. There’s a brief and somewhat clunky English-language news article from the local paper that describes the project: Ignacio Villalobos Carranza, Deputy Secretary for the Ministry of Public Security of Oaxaca, said most of […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Hearing and Language | Comments (5)

Hallucinating body flowers

July 28, 2012 – 2:56 pm

A curious and kaleidoscopic case of hallucinations reported in the latest journal Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria: A 95-year-old woman, with four years of schooling, had a seven-year history of DI [delusional infestation]. In the beginning, there were itching and prickling sensations on arms and head. Subsequently, she felt small worms, with different shapes and colors, crawling […]

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

Neuro images

May 24, 2012 – 8:52 pm

So how did I not know about the amazing neuroimages blog? It has plenty of beautiful pieces like this taken from neuroimaging to historical neuroscience to, er, edible brain sandwiches.

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Leave a Comment

Snakes on a brain

April 27, 2012 – 9:16 pm

The latest Journal of Neuroscience features a study on the neuroscience behind Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s famouse Rotating Snakes illusion and to celebrate they’re made a ‘Rotating Brain’ illusion for the front cover. This type of illusion, often called a peripheral drift illusion, was thought to occur due to slow drifting eye movements but this new study […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (2)

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 (6)

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)
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,632 other followers