Author Archives: Lascap

How to expect the unexpected: Fast motion overrides inattentional blindness

Posted on May 23, 2023 by Lascap

Imagine you are looking at a screen – much like you are doing now. On this screen are moving dots and you count how often they collide with each other. While you are doing that – unbeknownst to you – … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Introducing a Visual Illusion – the Scintillating Starburst

Posted on May 27, 2021 by Lascap

This post consists of two parts. The first part is aimed at introducing this new illusion to a general audience. The second part is intended to supplement technical details for specialist readers. Click here to navigate to the technical section … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 2 Comments

Flexing: A maladaptive coping strategy of insecure narcissists?

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Lascap

Existence has long been associated with the pain of living. Everyday life inherently poses many challenges to physical and mental integrity. Modern life in particular is characterized by frequent assaults on self-esteem in the form of unceasing comparisons to others … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 5 Comments

With great power comes great confidence – statistically

Posted on December 6, 2020 by Lascap

Appeal for a higher power Grant me the strength to accept that I cannot change the p-value, the power to distinguish between absence of evidence and evidence of absence and the wisdom to know the difference.

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Why it is important to take the virus seriously – or why this isn’t just like the flu

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Lascap

People could be forgiven for initially believing that COVID19 is just like the flu, as many have personal experience with the flu and gotten used to the risk posed by the flu. This tendency towards complacency was reinforced by bad … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

“The dress”, 5 years on

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Lascap

Today, 5 years ago, “the dress” broke online, and we have come a long way since then. If nothing else, this is a scary reminder of how fast time passes while one is busy doing other things. There were lots … Continue reading →

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Explaining why some people see “the sneaker” as pink, even though its pixels are grey

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Lascap

This has nothing to do with being left or right brained. People love brain based explanations, and this phenomenon has one, but a different one – see below. “This thing, yet again” seems to unsettle some people, but it is … Continue reading →

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Exploring the roots of disagreement with crocs and socks

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Lascap

Pascal Wallisch & Michael Karlovich The degree of polarized disagreement about current events is at an all-time high, and rising. So we need to understand disagreement better in order to avoid disagreeable results. A key problem when studying discord in … Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Psychology, Science | 5 Comments

How effective is cultural transmission?

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Lascap

In order to learn from history, one has to know about it first. Even then, it is hard to do – arguably, human nature is constant, but how it manifests is ever changing, as the circumstances change, mostly due to … Continue reading →

Posted in Psychology | Leave a comment

Pascal’s Wager 2.0

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Lascap

Obviously, you can believe whatever you want about metaphysics, as there is no observable reality to constrain you. That said, I believe the usual debates about theism vs. atheism miss the point. The real issue is not whether the world … Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy | 1 Comment

Is the overuse of low memory data types to blame for much of tribalism and overall nonsense one encounters online and offline?

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Lascap

The notion of “data types” is probably the most underrated concept outside of computer science that I can think of right now. Briefly, computers use “typed variables” to represent numbers internally. All numbers are internally represented as a collection of … Continue reading →

Posted in Pet peeve, Philosophy | Leave a comment

This is what is *really* going on with Laurel and Yanny – why your brain has to guess (without telling you)

Posted on May 27, 2018 by Lascap

At this point, we’re all *well* beyond peak #Yannygate. There have been comprehensive takes, there have been fun ones and there have been somber and downright ominous ones. But there have not been short ones that account for what we … Continue reading →

Posted in Psychology, Science | Leave a comment

#Yannygate highlights the underrated benefits of keeping foxes around

Posted on May 25, 2018 by Lascap

In May 2018, a phenomenon surfaced that lends itself of differential interpretation – some people hear “Laurel” whereas others hear “Yanny” when listening to the same clip. As far as I’m concerned, this is a direct audio analogue of #thedress … Continue reading →

Posted in In eigener Sache, Neuroscience, Pet peeve, Psychology, Science, Social commentary | 1 Comment

Social media and the challenge of managing disagreement positively

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Lascap

Technological change often entails social change. Historically, many of these changes were unintended and could not be foreseen at the time of making the technological advances. For instance, the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1400s. One … Continue reading →

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My policy on quote review

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Lascap

I understand the need of journalists to simplify quotes and make them more palatable to their audience. Academics have a tendency to hedge every statement. In fact, they would have to be an octopus to account for all the hands … Continue reading →

Posted in In eigener Sache | Leave a comment

Retro-viral phenomena: The dress over and over again

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Lascap

It is happening again. Another “dress”-like image just surfaced. As far as I can tell, more or less the same thing is going on. Ill defined lighting conditions in the images are being filled in by lighting assumptions, and they differ … Continue reading →

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Of psychopaths, musical tastes, media relations and games of telephone

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Lascap

Usually, I publicly comment on our work once it is published, like here, here or here. So I was quite surprised when I was approached by the Guardian to comment on an unpublished abstract. Neuroscientists typically present these as “work in progress” … Continue reading →

Posted in In eigener Sache, Science, Social commentary | 2 Comments

Vector projections

Posted on September 9, 2017 by Lascap

Hopefully, this will clear up some confusions regarding vector projections onto basis vectors.   Via Matlab, powered by @pascallisch          

Posted in Matlab | Leave a comment

What should we call science?

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Lascap

The term for science – scientia (knowledge) is terrible. Science is not knowledge. It is simply not (just) a bunch of facts. The German term “Wissenschaft” is slightly better, as it implies a knowledge creation engine. Something that creates knowledge, … Continue reading →

Posted in Pet peeve, Science | 1 Comment

Predicting movie taste

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Lascap

There is a fundamental tension between how movie critics conceive of their role and how their reviews are utilized by the moviegoing public. Movie critics by and large see their job as educating the public as to what is a good movie and explaining … Continue reading →

Posted in In eigener Sache, Journal club, Psychology, Science | 1 Comment