Despite the fact it’s from Cracked, this article on 5 Ways Your Brain Is Messing With Your Head has some remarkably spiffy stuff. In it.
The five ways, by the way, are:
- Change Blindness (we don’t notice when things change, even when it’s before our eyes).
- Saccadic Masking (we don’t notice blurs of motion in our vision, blacking them out instead — and then not noticing the blackouts).
- Proprioception (our extremely fallible sense of where our body parts are).
- Cryptomnesia (our brains plagiarize a lot).
- Subconscious Behavior (our brains make a lot of guesses we’re not aware of, a lot of them wrong).
Very cool.
(via Les)
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Proprioception- My stepson has dyspraxia- which is a lack of spacial awareness. This means he can’t always identify where bodily parts (hands fingers etc) that he can’t see are.
Eyes are badly made. Imagine a camera where the cable to the storage goes out through the centre of the lens- hence blind spot. In addition the reason we don’t always see everything is that the brain can not process the whole picture all the time- it looks for movement so it only has to update that bit.
People tend to act then rationalise then act. Most of the prisoners I deal with lack thinking skills- they have to be taught how to visualise consequences.
On the other hand doctors took a man with a rare brain dysfunction (but had previously been ‘normal’) that meant he could not feel emotions. The expectation was he could make better decisions (a la Spock). Instead they found he was unable to make any decisions. Even simple things, because he then had no sense of proportion, took a long (but logical, weighing pros and cons)decision making process- “Red coffee cup or blue?”
sorry “rationalise THAT act”
sorry “rationalise THEN act”
The human brain is a pretty amazing thing — especially that it functions as well as it does with as much goofiness as it has.