We are accustomed to depending on our five basic senses and have completely forgotten that they can sometimes lie: different parts of the brain together form our understanding of reality, but this often goes against common sense - our gray matter has a number of significant shortcomings. For example:
1. Your eyes can make you hear words.
When you hear someone speak, at first glance everything is quite simple: the other person's mouth generates the sound that your ears hear. This scheme seems to work great, what could go wrong?
In fact, your eyes can deceive you: vision is the dominant sense for most people, which means that sometimes your eyes determine what your ears hear.
For example, a person says something like “bang-bang-bang” over and over again, and after that he suddenly changes the sound to “fah-fah-fah” - at least according to the eyes. In fact, the sound does not change, only the “picture” changes: that is, the voice still says “bang”, but since the articulation has changed somewhat, you automatically begin to hear a different sound, and if you close your eyes or turn away, the sound will again turn into "bang".
This illusion is called the McGurk effect, and the amazing thing is that even if you know what sound is actually being pronounced, your ears will still hear what your eyes tell you. Typically, the McGurk effect is minimal when you're dealing with someone you know, but it's at its fullest when you're talking to a stranger. Even what a person is wearing matters - you subconsciously expect certain words from him.
2. Your brain removes some objects from your field of vision when you're driving.
We've all seen optical illusions, but this is just a small part of how the brain can trick our senses: it can ignore the light of a flashlight in the rearview mirror at night while you're driving.
Have you noticed the yellow dots around the circle? No, because after a few seconds they disappear from view: you know that the dots are still there, but your brain refuses to see them. In the same way, the light of streetlights and headlights disappears when you concentrate on the road ahead. This is why people involved in road accidents often say: “He seemed to come out of nowhere!”
Scientists call this phenomenon “motion-induced blindness.” This is thought to be the brain's ability to discard information that it currently identifies as unimportant. There are too many stimuli in the world - sounds, smells, objects moving towards you - and if the brain were to process all the incoming information, it would receive a significant overload. Instead, it filters out "useless" things: this is why it is so difficult to track all the random passers-by walking down the same street as you.
The problem is that the brain doesn't always respond to the signals correctly: in our example, the brain mistakes the blue lines for something important because they move, and ignores the yellow dots because they stay in place.
3. Your eyes can influence the taste of food
Unless you have a disorder called synesthesia, you probably don’t think about what a color tastes like or, conversely, what a taste looks like. But in fact, these feelings are interconnected: our eyes determine how much we like this or that food, and it’s not just that we want to eat food that looks appetizing more.
For example, tasters believe that some foods go better with red wine, and others with white wine; moreover, each type of wine develops its taste at a certain temperature. Scientists set out to find out what influences the perception of taste, and asked members of one of the London wine clubs to describe the aroma of white wine. At first, people talked about flavors traditionally considered characteristic of white wine—banana, passion fruit, red pepper—but when researchers added red coloring to the wine, experts began talking about flavors characteristic of red wine. Note that it was the same wine, just a different color.
This experiment was repeated many times in different clubs, and the result was always the same. Once, one of the most authoritative tasters tried to describe the taste of a white wine colored red, and tried for quite a long time - not because he correctly identified the variety, but because he was trying to recognize what red berries this wine was made from.
The wine example is not the only one: the shade of the glass can affect the temperature and taste of the drink, for example, in one experiment, participants found hot chocolate tastier if they drank it from orange or coffee-colored cups, and the taste of strawberry jelly seemed fuller if the dish was served on a white plate, not a dark one.
4. Your brain “changes” the size of surrounding objects
The eyes often deceive us about the size of objects we see: look at the two red lines in a photo and try to figure out which one is longer.
If you answered that the line is on the right, then you are an absolutely normal person, and you are also mistaken - if you place the lines next to each other, it will become obvious that they are the same. The brain makes the line on the left smaller for the same reason why distant objects appear smaller to you—it's a matter of perspective.
To see such illusions in real life, just look at the night sky: when the Moon just rises above the horizon, it looks huge, but over the next few hours it gradually “shrinks” and closer to midnight it seems very small. This doesn't mean that the Moon has suddenly moved away from the Earth - it only looks bigger because objects in front of it - trees and buildings - create the illusion of perspective.
And what’s strange is that how easily you succumb to illusions depends on what you are used to seeing: for example, city dwellers are more vulnerable to optical illusions. On the other hand, if you grew up far away from civilization, your brain won't have as many memories of large rectangular objects stored in it, making it harder to fool it with an illusion.
5. You can easily forget where your limbs are.
If you put a fake rubber hand next to your hand and ask which hand is actually yours, you will probably answer this question without thinking, but most likely you will be wrong. If your real hand is covered with something, and you see only your hands, then simply touching both hands at the same time is enough to mislead your brain: you do not see your real hand and automatically mistake the fake - visible - hand for yours. If you hit an artificial hand with a hammer, you will flinch, although you will not feel pain - the brain will instinctively react to the blow.
What's even more interesting is that once your brain mistakes the artificial hand for your own, the temperature of the real hand, hidden from your eyes, drops sharply, indicating that blood flow is being restricted at this time - in other words, your brain begins to deny the very existence of your real hand physiologically. level.
This phenomenon, also called proprioception, shows that your eyes play a huge role in your awareness of your own body parts: it allows you to drive a car without looking at your feet or touch-type text on a keyboard. It's the same reason why teenagers seem clumsy—they don't have time to adjust to being grown up, and their brains often distort the visual perception of their own body.
Proprioception is often used to treat phantom pain after amputation - simply showing the patient the artificial limb using a mirror is enough for the brain to decide that the arm or leg is still there.
Our mind is not a mirror of what is happening around us. Much of what we see in the external world comes from within and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensations. Scientists have found many ways that reveal the deceptiveness of our senses, and here are some of them.
1. Ganzfeld procedure
The Ganzfeld procedure is a gentle sensory isolation technique that was first proposed in experimental psychology in the 1930s. For this experiment, you need to tune the radio to interference, lie down on the sofa and use adhesive tape to attach half of the table tennis balls to your eyes. Within a minute the person begins to experience hallucinations. Some people see horses running in the clouds, others hear the voice of a deceased relative.
The thing is that our mind is dependent on sensations and when there are very few of them, our brain begins to invent its own.
2. Reduce pain
If you suddenly get slightly injured, look at the damaged part with upside-down binoculars - the pain should decrease.
Scientists at the University of Oxford demonstrated in an experiment that looking at a wounded arm through the far end of binoculars visually reduced the size of the arm, as well as pain and swelling. This suggests that even basic sensations, such as pain, depend on our vision.
3. Pinocchio Illusion
This experience requires two chairs and a blindfold. The man with the blindfold sits in the back seat, looking at the man in front. The blindfolded person then reaches out his hand and places it on the nose of the person sitting in front.
At the same time, he touches his nose with his other hand and begins to lightly stroke both noses. After about a minute, more than 50% of people say their nose lengthens.
4. Thinking trick
Raise your right leg a few centimeters from the floor and begin to move it in a clockwise direction. While you're doing this, use your right index finger to draw the number 6 in the air. Your leg will start to turn counterclockwise and you won't be able to do anything about it.
The left half of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, is responsible for rhythm and timing. She cannot cope with the work of two opposing movements at the same time and combines them into one movement.
5. Hearing deception
This trick can be done with three people, one of whom will be the test subject, and the other two will be observers. You will also need headphones attached to two plastic tubes on both sides. Ask the subject to sit on a chair equidistant between the two observers. Each observer takes turns speaking into the receiver from the appropriate side. In this case, the listener correctly determines the direction of the sound. If you exchange handsets and start talking, the listener will get confused and will point in the opposite direction from the sound.
Auditory localization is the ability of a person to determine the direction of a sound source. The human auditory system has a limited ability to determine the distance of a sound source, and is based on inter-sound time differences. When you change tubes, the perception of neurons on the opposite side of the brain is activated, and the person cannot determine the source of the sound.
6. Rubber hand illusion
More than ten years ago, psychologists discovered an illusion that can convince a person that a rubber hand is his own. For this experiment you need a rubber hand or an inflated rubber glove, a piece of cardboard and two brushes. Place the rubber hand on the table in front of you and hide your hand behind the cardboard. Have someone stroke the real hand and the rubber hand at the same time, using the same brush strokes.
In a few minutes you will feel as if the artificial hand has become your flesh. If you ask another person to hit a rubber hand, the person will feel anxiety and pain because the brain is convinced that the rubber hand is real.
7. A sound that is heard by those under 20 years old
This sound, a sinusoid with a frequency of 18,000 Hertz, is audible to those who are not yet 20 years old. It is used by some teenagers as a cell phone ringtone to prevent other people from hearing whether the phone is ringing. You can listen.
As a person gets older, he loses the ability to hear sounds of higher tones, and therefore only young people under 20 are able to hear them.
8. Purkinje effect
Jan Purkinje Jan Purkinje, the founder of modern neuroscience, discovered an interesting hallucination while still a child. He closed his eyes, turned his head towards the sun and began to quickly move his hand back and forth in front of his closed eyes.
After a few minutes, Purkinje noticed multi-colored figures that became more and more intricate.
Subsequently, scientists created special glasses on which light came on at a certain frequency. This stimulation short-circuits the brain's visual cortex, causing cells to light up in unpredictable ways, resulting in imaginary images.
Also read “5 mind-blowing ways your brain uses to constantly lie to you” on Publi.
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Deceive all the senses
To make it easier to come to terms with the fact that our eyes constantly deceive us, let’s start with the fact that all our senses are deceived in one way or another. That's how it happened.
For example, stereo systems deceive our ears. The “bifurcation” and the corresponding direction of the sound do their job - the effect of presence is obtained, i.e. it seems to a person that he is in the epicenter of video events, or in the hall during a concert.
The taste is easily deceived with the help of flavor enhancers and taste substitutes. There are entire enterprises that produce the taste and aroma of the products that we are used to eating. Thanks to this, our brain, seeing some cheese produced unknown when, tells us that it is fresh, tasty, and worthy of our attention.
It is also interesting that information received from one sense organ is adjusted depending on information received from other sense organs. The brain, taking into account everything received, produces an average picture. So, the color of food affects its taste; when you have a runny nose, food seems tasteless, etc.
Optical illusion. At every step
Why is the information received by the eyes distorted? Let's try to figure it out. The organs of vision see some kind of picture and conscientiously transmit visual signals to the brain for processing. He already has schemes for processing the information he receives.
For example, light and shade placed in a certain way will tell the brain that the object visible to the eyes is three-dimensional. Also, do not forget that a certain image is formed from pictures received from two eyes, and they are somewhat different.
You also need to talk about this. For the brain, every image that the eyes give it is new. At the same time, everything we see is already similar to what we once saw before.
So, the brain uses our visual experience in order to complete the picture now, at a specific moment.
Essentially, the brain receives absolutely meaningless information from the eyes, and itself gives it meaning. Thanks to this, we see what we see.
When the brain processes the data received from the organs of vision, it seems to remove everything unnecessary. This is well realized when considering the “two in one” picture. There are two drawings on a piece of paper, but our brain perceives one drawing and ignores the other.
This happens very, very often in life. For example, a person likes a certain car model. And it often seems to him that there are very, very many of them traveling around the city. But a hungry person notices signs and advertisements for public catering establishments everywhere, and sees only goodies in people’s hands. All other information is seemingly ignored.
And that is not all. The brain can adjust the resulting image according to the person's emotions. In order to better imagine this, let us recall such an experiment. Two groups of people were shown the same photo of the same man.
Some were told that this man was a murderer and a most dangerous criminal, while others were told that he was a famous scientist, a genius of world science. In both cases, people were asked to describe the man's appearance. It’s easy to guess that representatives of different groups saw the person in the photo completely differently.
The conclusion here can be drawn as follows: a person sees what he wants to see.
Let us immediately remember the situations when we receive information with the help of our eyes, and it, flying past our mind, our thoughts, goes straight to the brain. The most striking example is hidden advertising.
Imagine this situation. You are watching a movie. And then you realize that you really want to eat a hamburger. All your thoughts are no longer absorbed by the film, but by the nearby McDonald's. What's the matter? - you are perplexed. After all, the film is about racing, no food - only cars.
It's all because of hidden advertising. Somewhere on the podium during a car race, it is likely that an image of a hamburger flashed in one way or another. Your eyes saw him, bypassing consciousness, and sent the information directly into the subconscious. The result is hunger and the desire to eat just such a hamburger.
And further. It is impossible not to recall the well-known experience that is shown to all students without exception - psychologists and social psychologists. A video is shown to a group of people. It shows several people in red T-shirts and several people in white T-shirts throwing a regular ball. The subjects' task is to count how many times the people in the video in red T-shirts make passes specifically among themselves.
Several minutes pass. The video ends. The subjects are happy to report the counted number of passes. But it turns out that the task is just a distraction. In fact, the researchers were not at all interested in the number of passes made, but in how selective our attention is, how much we miss when we concentrate on one thing. So, during the video, a man in a gorilla suit appeared on the screen, right among the people throwing the ball. Nobody noticed him.
The subjects were told this and given them to watch the same video again. The gorilla was seen, but the man in a T-shirt of a different color, who had appeared from somewhere, was not. As well as the fact that during the video one of those transferring left the field of view.
Conclusion. It seems to us that we see everything. We are confident that our eyes reflect the surrounding reality as accurately as possible. In reality, everything is not like that .
We see what we want, we see what others want, what our brain wants, what our consciousness allows us to see. What, in this case, is an optical illusion? The question is more of a philosophical one...
What to do if you don't believe your eyes?
Is there anything you can do if you don't really believe what you see? In most cases no. Unfortunately. If you decide to deceive you in some way, then most likely it will work out. Especially if it's a professional.
Based on various studies and scientific achievements in the field of studying the brain, sensory organs, and eyes, it is possible to create a situation where a person will be deceived. And the more money invested in a trick, the more likely it is that you won’t even realize that what you see is not what it really is.
This is a reality that must be accepted. Man is not perfect. The person may be deceived and confused. Treat it normally. Let such situations be associated with magicians and magicians, and not with scammers.
Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus
Belarusian State University
Faculty of Law
Deception of the brain and senses
Is done by a student
2nd year law faculty
Department of Economic Law
11 groups of full-time education
Bakanov Maxim Olegovich
_____________________________
Teacher Professor, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Barkovsky L.M. Minsk, 2012
The sense organs are a peripheral anatomical and physiological system that, thanks to their receptors, ensures receipt and primary analysis from the primary world and from other organs of the body itself, that is, the external and internal environment of the body.
Humans have five senses, namely touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision. More than 80% of the information a person receives is perceived visually. Not all objects can be viewed clearly by a person. Delusion in general refers to things that a person perceives inaccurately. The most common effect is visual illusions. An incorrect perception of a thing can occur for many reasons, but most often it occurs due to a reason closely related to the psychological and physiological properties of the individual.
The brain combines all the information that we see, hear, feel, etc. Our brain can play tricks on us, and often the consequences of incorrect sensory reactions in the brain are reflected in our daily lives. There is even a special science that studies brain deception - psychoacoustics. Discoveries within the framework of this science have shown that our ears do not perceive all parameters of signals, but only the frequency of sound, its beginning and end, as well as the strength of sound pressure. All other parameters: timbre, pitch and volume are the result of brain work. Therefore, we may not hear some signals, but our brain will definitely feel them. By the way, thanks to this feature, popular audio drugs were created. By influencing brain signals, these audio files are able to penetrate the human psyche and consciousness.
Brain tricking has benefited amputees the most. Discoveries in the field of anatomy have created ways to trick the brain and relieve pain in the place where the limb used to be. This method became “mirror therapy”. With its help, the reflection of an entire limb was transmitted to the brain and after several repeated sessions, a feeling was created that the limb that no longer existed was in place again.
Such studies have proven that the brain has unique plasticity. By deception, he can be instilled with useful changes at the bodily and cellular level. Thanks to these discoveries, the correction of neurological diseases became possible. For example, you can now change your gait, posture, adjust your body weight, and even cure anorexia.
Vision is the most sensitive organ of our body. However, this sense organ is not only a source of information for us, but also serves as a means of deceiving the brain. Scientists demonstrated this using the famous “GA-GA experiment.” This experiment is as follows:
The guest actor with good diction clearly said "GA-GA-GA-GA" in front of the video camera. His face was filmed in close-up. Then the same actor clearly said “BA-BA-BA-BA” into a microphone without a video camera. The video engineer would then take the audio track from the "GA-GA" video and replace it with the "BA-BA" audio. That is, the person in the frame said “GA-GA”, but the sound was “BA-BA”
If you stand in front of a mirror and say “Ga” and then “Bah”, you will see that the movements of your lips are different.
Then they invited the subjects, who were placed in front of the video recording. And they asked to look at the recording and say what they heard, and also listen with their eyes closed and also say what they heard. If the subject watched the video, he heard “HA”; if he listened with his eyes closed, he heard “BA”.
How could a person hear the sound "HA" if it was not there?
Information enters the human brain through several channels - visual, auditory, tactile... When a person closed his eyes, he...
We are accustomed to depending on our five basic senses and have completely forgotten that they can sometimes lie: different parts of the brain together form our idea of reality, but often this goes against common sense - our gray matter has a number of significant shortcomings. For example:
1. Your eyes can make you hear words.
When you hear someone speak, at first glance everything is quite simple: the other person's mouth generates the sound that your ears hear. This scheme seems to work great, what could go wrong?
In fact, your eyes can deceive you: vision is the dominant sense for most people, which means that sometimes your eyes determine what your ears hear.
For example, a person says something like “bang-bang-bang” over and over again, and after that he suddenly changes the sound to “fah-fah-fah” - at least according to the eyes. In fact, the sound does not change, only the “picture” changes: that is, the voice still says “bang”, but since the articulation has changed somewhat, you automatically begin to hear a different sound, and if you close your eyes or turn away, the sound will again turn into "bang".
This illusion is called the McGurk effect, and the amazing thing is that even if you know what sound is actually being pronounced, your ears will still hear what your eyes tell you. Typically, the McGurk effect is minimal when you're dealing with someone you know, but it's at its fullest when you're talking to a stranger. Even what a person is wearing matters - you subconsciously expect certain words from him.
2. Your brain removes some objects from your field of vision when you're driving.
We've all seen optical illusions, but this is just a small part of how the brain can trick our senses: it can ignore the light of a flashlight in the rearview mirror at night while you're driving. As an example, look at the green dot in the center of the picture blinking for ten seconds.
Have you noticed the yellow dots around the circle? No, because after a few seconds they disappear from view: you know that the dots are still there, but your brain refuses to see them. In the same way, the light of streetlights and headlights disappears when you concentrate on the road ahead. This is why people involved in road accidents often say: “He seemed to come out of nowhere!”
Scientists call this phenomenon “motion-induced blindness.” It is thought to be the brain's ability to discard information that it currently identifies as unimportant. There are too many stimuli in the world - sounds, smells, moving objects - and if the brain processed all the incoming information, it would receive a significant overload. Instead, it filters out "useless" things: this is why it is so difficult to track all the random passers-by walking down the same street as you.
The problem is that the brain doesn't always respond to the signals correctly: in our example, the brain mistakes the blue lines for something important because they move, and ignores the yellow dots because they stay in place.
3. Your eyes can influence the taste of food
Unless you have a disorder called synesthesia, then you are unlikely to think about what a color tastes like or, conversely, what a taste looks like. But in fact, these feelings are interconnected: our eyes determine how much we like this or that food, and it’s not just that we want to eat food that looks appetizing more.
For example, tasters believe that some foods go better with red wine, and others with white wine; moreover, each type of wine develops its taste at a certain temperature. Scientists set out to find out what influences the perception of taste, and asked members of one of the London wine clubs to describe the aroma of white wine. At first, people talked about flavors traditionally considered characteristic of white wine - bananas, passion fruit, red pepper - but when researchers added red coloring to the wine, experts began talking about flavors characteristic of red wine. Note that it was the same wine, just a different color.
This experiment was repeated many times in different clubs, and the result was always the same. Once, one of the most authoritative tasters tried to describe the taste of a white wine colored red, and tried for quite a long time - not because he correctly identified the variety, but because he was trying to recognize what red berries this wine was made from.
The example with wine is not the only one: the shade of the glass can affect the temperature and taste of the drink, for example, in one experiment, participants found hot chocolate tastier if they drank it from orange or coffee-colored cups, and the taste of strawberry jelly seemed fuller if the dish was served on a white plate, not a dark one.
4. Your brain “changes” the size of surrounding objects
The eyes often deceive us about the size of objects we see: look at the two red lines in a photo and try to figure out which one is longer.
If you answered that the line is on the right, then you are an absolutely normal person, and you are also mistaken - if you place the lines next to each other, it will become obvious that they are the same. The brain made the line on the left smaller for the same reason why distant objects appear smaller to you - it's a matter of perspective.
To see such illusions in real life, just look at the night sky: when the Moon just rises above the horizon, it looks huge, but over the next few hours it gradually “shrinks” and closer to midnight it seems very small. This doesn't mean that the Moon has suddenly moved away from the Earth - it only looks larger because objects in front of it - trees and buildings - create the illusion of perspective.
And here’s what’s strange: how easily you succumb to illusions depends on what you are used to seeing: for example, city residents are more vulnerable to optical illusions. On the other hand, if you grew up far away from civilization, your brain won't have as many memories of large rectangular objects stored in it, making it harder to fool it with an illusion.
5. You can easily forget where your limbs are.
If you put a fake rubber hand next to your hand and ask which hand is actually yours, you will probably answer this question without thinking, but most likely you will be wrong. If your real hand is covered with something, and you see only your hands, then simply touching both hands at the same time is enough to mislead your brain: you do not see your real hand and automatically mistake the fake - visible - hand for yours. If you hit an artificial hand with a hammer, you will flinch, although you will not feel pain - the brain will instinctively react to the blow.
What's even more interesting is that once your brain mistakes the artificial hand for your own, the temperature of the real hand, hidden from your eyes, drops sharply, indicating that blood flow is being restricted at this time - in other words, your brain begins to deny the very existence of your real hand physiologically. level.
This phenomenon, also called proprioception, shows that your eyes play a huge role in your awareness of your own body parts: it allows you to drive a car without looking at your feet or touch-type text on a keyboard. For the same reason, teenagers seem awkward - they do not immediately have time to get used to the fact that they have grown up, and their brains often distort the visual perception of their own body.
Proprioception is often used to treat phantom pain after amputation - simply showing the patient the artificial limb using a mirror is enough for the brain to decide that the arm or leg is still there.
