Science News

The eye and the intellect play off one another in surprising and beautiful ways in the art of M.C. Escher. Where the Renaissance masters used shading and perspective to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on two dimensional surfaces, Escher turned those tricks in on themselves to create puzzles and paradoxes. He manipulated our faculties of perception not simply to please the senses, but to stimulate the mind.

If you watch this video normally, the moving circles in the first animation rotate while the shifting dots in the second clip follow a horizontal path. But if you look away and watch the movie out of the corner of your eye, the direction of motion will appear to change. In both cases, the moving objects seem to follow the direction of the background stripes.

Researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center have unveiled how and why the public perceives some magic tricks in recent studies that could have real-world implications in military tactics, marketing and sports.

If there’s ever excuse to publish an optical illusion as cool as the “Rotating Snakes,” I’ll take it. This illusion was invented in 2003 by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, and ever since, Kitaoka and other scientists have been trying to figure out why it works. A new paper by Stephen Macknik at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix may have the answer.

Many amputees can still feel their missing limb, sometimes quite painfully. Scientists aren't sure what causes phantom limb pain, but they have developed interesting ways to combat the condition.

It's not the chemical content of alcohol that makes us think we're more attractive, it's merely the belief that we're drunk that inflates our self-perceived appeal (up to a point - in fact the average self-judged attractiveness rating for the group who though they'd had alcohol still wasn't that high).

More about DRUNK: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=drunk

Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, in his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life.

A group of psychologists led by Harvard's Karl Spzunar have investigated our optimistic forecasting by testing people's memories of events that haven't actually happened.

PSYCHOLOGY: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=psychology

Shadows can lie.

In one sense, the main theme of the Being Human conference was “illusion.” Illusions occur when what we perceive does not match with the true state of the world. When our thoughts do not accurately reflect objective reality. Visual illusions make this obvious, and we usually enjoy them. We see one white square and one black square, but they turn out to truly be the same shade of grey. Or two lines of equal length appear to be different. A waterfall flows ever downward yet somehow also falls up.