Monday, June 18, 2012

Your Brain: It's All In Your Head

     Did you see it the first time? Less than 10% of people in a study done with a similar video saw the hidden distraction. This is because your brain can only take so much information at a time, and counting the number of passes and making sure you are counting white instead of black is enough to shut out everything else that is not important to the task. The brain controls everything our bodies do, and some things are dubbed not important enough for us to not even see it, like the bear.
     Our brains can trick us in other ways too. A group of people showed some taekwondo teachers two videos of two people fighting, one person was wearing red protective gear, the other wearing blue. In both cases, the teachers thought red was the winner. Could this be a coincidence? No, because both videos were of the same fight, except the colors had been switched.
     Lastly, do we really taste what we taste? One man decided to test the theory that we taste what we see, not what we taste. He gave guests at a dinner a red jello, and asked them what they tasted. The majority said it tasted like cherry or another berry, but the jello was actually lemon flavored. He also had people take a wine taste test. The first wine had a label that made the bottle look cheep, the second bottle had an expensive looking label and a fancy french name. Both bottles had the same wine that you can buy for next to nothing (it came in a box), but the testers said that the second, more "expensive brand" tasted better. There is some food for thought
     Our brains are constantly judging things without giving them a chance, because there are more important things than how the wine tastes. That wine looks expensive, shouldn't it taste better? Even though our brains are amazing and wonderful, there are some things that can trick it into thinking almost anything.

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