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+21 +1
The Future of Reality Is Multiple Choice
As a new Matrix film arrives in theaters, our senior senior correspondent asks: What is real?
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+15 +1
Our Ability To Perceive Musical Beat Becomes More Refined Through Childhood
If you were to play your favourite song right now, I imagine you’d have little difficulty clapping along with the beat. Our appreciation of beat allows us to clap, dance, march and sway in time with a piece of music — or just with each other. As the authors of a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General point out, these behaviours occur spontaneously across human cultures. But while moving to a beat seems effortless, it involves all kinds of perceptual processes.
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+11 +1
It’s impossible to see the world as it is, argues a cognitive neuroscientist
Many scientists believe that natural selection brought our perception of reality into clearer and deeper focus, reasoning that growing more attuned to the outside world gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, thinks that just the opposite is true.
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+8 +1
The Perceptive Paradox
All perception is created by the brain, which is therefore illusory and limited by its own function. Because of a certain way the neurons within our brain get fired on specific inputs, they give a distinct output or reaction expressed in our physical reality. A visual of a pizza advertisement gives you a pleasurable craving which can then be converted into an output action, for example.
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+16 +1
People with a keener sense of smell find sex more pleasant and, if they are female, have more orgasms during sex
Scent plays an often under-appreciated role in sexual attraction, helping to account for why visual attractiveness alone can’t explain just how physically attractive a person is perceived to be. But what role does our ability to smell our partners – or potential partners – play in actual experience? We know from past research that men born without the ability to smell tend to have fewer sexual partners. And about half of people who lose their sense of smell, through infection or injury, report negative impacts on their sexual behaviour.
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+13 +1
The Speed in Which You Perceive The World Can Be Altered With a Video
The speed in which you see moving objects around you, can be shifted up or down with the help of a stimulus such as a video. In their study, Visual adaptation alters the apparent speed of real-world actions, researchers from University of Lincoln and University of Stirling have shown that the perceived speed of a moving object can be altered with a stimulus, such as an adapting video, which was used in their experiment.
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+17 +1
Creating The Never-Ending Bloom
John Edmark's sculptures are both mesmerizing and mathematical. Using meticulously crafted platforms, patterns, and layers, Edmark's art explores the seemingly magical properties that are present in spiral geometries. In his most recent body of work, Edmark creates a series of animating “blooms” that endlessly unfold and animate as they spin beneath a strobe light.
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+29 +1
Pushing That Crosswalk Button May Make You Feel Better, but …
Some buttons, such as the door-close button on an elevator, are mere artifices — placebos that promote an illusion of control but in reality do not work. By Christopher Mele.
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+35 +1
Why Does Time Seem to Speed Up with Age?
James M. Broadway, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Brittiney Sandoval, a recent graduate of the same institution, answer.
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+16 +1
This cognitive scientist says the world as we know it is an illusion
The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.
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+30 +1
Time’s Up on the Death Penalty
Capital punishment is barely used anymore, and should be repealed.
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+26 +1
Shark Population Decrease Due To Fin Harvesting, Not Climate Change
Shark population decrese were found to have been caused by human harm to the seas --- the international fin harvesting of shark's fins.
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+27 +1
Why You Didn’t See It Coming
You don’t see it coming. You probably couldn’t if you tried. The effects of large changes in scale are frequently beyond our powers of perception, even our imagination.
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+33 +1
Why half of the life you experience is over by age 7
Have you ever observed that time seems to be going by faster as you get older? There's a reason that one summer seems to stretch out forever when you're a kid, but zips by before you know it when you're 30. That reason is perspective, as a gorgeous interactive visualization, by Austrian designer Maximilian Kiener, demonstrates. When you're one year old, a year is literally forever to you -- it's all the time that you've ever known.
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