Mind

Hacks 75-80 What makes "this" a word, rather than being simply the adjacently written letters t, h, i, s? Or, to ask a similar question, why should we see a single dog running across a field rather than a collection of legs, ears, hair, and a...

Knowing these can help your visual information design to sit well with people's expectations. It's a given that we see the world not as isolated parts, but as groups and single objects. Instead of seeing fingers and a palm, we see a hand. ...

It's poor logic but a great hack for spotting patterns. It's a confusing, noisy world out there. It's easier to understand the world if we perceive a set of objects rather than just a raw mass of sensations, and one way to do this is to grou...

Visual perception has special routines for grouping things that move along together into single objects [Hack #76] . That's why we see cars as cars and not a collection of wheels, glass, and side-view mirrors just happening to travel along in t...

Sometimes, when there isn't evidence of causation, your perceptual system detects self-causation and delivers up an impression of animacythat quality of having active purpose that makes objects seem alive. Animacy is simultaneously easy to se...

Research suggests that just as the visual system works to recover the physical structure of the world by inferring properties such as 3-D shape, so too does it work to recover the causal and social structure of the world by inferring properties su...

Place your hand on the table. Look at it as an object, not unlike just about anything else on the table. Now, raise one of your fingers. Why did you raise that one? Can you say? Was it a free choice? Or was the decision made somewhere else, somew...