Mind

Hacks 53-6 This chapter looks at how we integrate our perceptionsimages ( Chapter 2), sounds (Chapter 4), our own mechanisms of attention (Chapter 3), and our other senses [Hack #2] into a unified perceptual experience. For instance, how do w...

Hearing is good for timing [Hack #44] but not so good for locating things in space. On the flip side, vision has two million channels for detecting location in space but isn't as fast as hearing. What happens when you combine the two? Wha...

Where you place your attention in visual space affects what you hear in auditory space. Attention exists as a central, spatially allocated resource. Where you direct attention is not independent across the senses. Where you pay attention to i...

If you're thinking nonlinguistically, they can't. The Stroop Effect is a classic of experimental psychology. In fact, it's more than a classic, it's an industry. J. Ridley Stroop first did his famous experiment in 1935, and it's been repli...

So much of what we do in everyday life is responding to something that we've seen or heardchoosing and clicking a button on a dialog box on a computer or leaping to turn the heat off when a pan boils over. Unfortunately, we're not very good at r...

The vision and audition chapters (Chapter 2 and Chapter 4, respectively) of this book look at the senses individually, just as a lot of psychologists have over the years. But interesting things begin to happen when you look at the senses as they ...

Look through a magnifying glass and it becomes even more sensitive. The skin is the shortest-range interface we have with the world. It is the only sense that doesn't provide any information about distant objects. If you can feel something o...

If there were ever a way of showing that your senses combine to completely change your ultimate experience, it's the McGurk Effect. This classic illusion, invented by Harry McGurk (and originally published in 19761, makes you hear different sound...

Sense information is mixed together in the brain and sorted by location [Hack #54], and we use this organization in choosing what to pay attention to (and therefore tune into). If you're listening to two different conversations simultaneously, i...

Language might be an astoundingly efficient way of getting information into your head from the outside [Hack #49] , but that's not its only job. It also helps you think. Far from being a sign of madness, talking to yourself is something at the ...