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Category Archives: Science
How to expect the unexpected: Fast motion overrides inattentional blindness
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 attention, evolution, Gorilla, Inattentional blindness, information filtering, Invisible Gorilla, Mark 14, Torpedo
1 Comment
Introducing a Visual Illusion – the Scintillating Starburst
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?
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
Exploring the roots of disagreement with crocs and socks
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
This is what is *really* going on with Laurel and Yanny – why your brain has to guess (without telling you)
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
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Retro-viral phenomena: The dress over and over again
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
Posted in Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Social commentary
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Of psychopaths, musical tastes, media relations and games of telephone
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
What should we call science?
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
Predicting movie taste
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
Revisiting the dress: Lessons for the study of qualia and science
When #thedress first came out in February 2015, vision scientists had plenty of ideas why some people might be seeing it differently than others, but no one knew for sure. Now we have some evidence as to what might be going on. … Continue reading
Posted in Journal club, Neuroscience, Psychology, Science
5 Comments
Autism and the microbiome
The incidence of autism has been on the rise for 40 years. We don’t know why, but the terrible burden of suffering has spurred people to urgently look for a cause. As there are all kinds of secular trends over … Continue reading
Posted in Neuroscience, Nutrition, Psychology, Science
2 Comments
A primer on the science of sleep
I’ve written about sleep and the need to sleep and how sleep is measured before, but in order to foster our #citizenscience efforts at NYU, I want to bring accessible and actionable pieces on the science of sleep together in one place, here. 1. How … Continue reading
Posted in Life, Neuroscience, Psychology, Science
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Explaining color constancy
The brain is using spectral information of light waves (their wavelength mix) to aid in the identification of objects. This works because any given object will absorb some wavelengths of the light source (the illuminant) and reflect others. For instance, plants … Continue reading
Posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Science
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The neuroscience of violent rage
Violent rage results from the activation of dedicated neural circuitry that is on the lookout for existential threats to prehistoric lifestyles. Life in civilization is largely devoid of these threats, but this system is still in place, triggering what largely … Continue reading
Posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Science
1 Comment
Brighter than the sun: Introducing Powerscape
Statistical power needs are often counterintuitive and underestimated. This has deleterious consequences for a number of scientific fields. Most science practitioners cannot reasonably be expected to make power calculations themselves. So we did it for them and visualized this as … Continue reading
Posted in Psychology, Science
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Tracking the diversity of popular music since 1940
This is a rather straightforward post. Our lab is doing research on music taste and one of our projects involves sampling songs from the Billboard Hot 100. It tracks the singles that made it to the #1 in the charts in … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Social commentary
5 Comments
Did a 6th century Hebrew fortuneteller accidentally do the first documented experiment?
Who did the first experiment? 13th century scholastics like Roger Bacon are usually credited with the invention of the modern scientific method – in particular with regard to doing experiments. Bacon expanded on the work of Robert Grosseteste, who revived … Continue reading
Posted in History, Philosophy, Science
1 Comment
Why “dressgate”* matters
At this point, we have probably all reached “peak dress”, been oversaturated by all matters dress and are ready to move on. But there is more. There is no question that “the dress” is the most viral image relevant to … Continue reading
Posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Science, Social commentary
9 Comments
Lessons from the dress: The fundamental ambiguity of visual perception
The brain lives in a bony shell. The completely light-tight nature of the skull renders this home a place of complete darkness. So the brain relies on the eyes to supply an image of the outside world, but there are … Continue reading
Posted in Neuroscience, Psychology, Science
4 Comments
#Yannygate highlights the underrated benefits of keeping foxes around
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 →