The Mind | Human Nature + Illusions + Magic

Advances in the investigation of the physical universe we live in.
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Typhoon
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The Mind | Human Nature + Illusions + Magic

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Parodite
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Re: Illusions

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Deep down I'm very superficial
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Apollonius
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Re: Illusions

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Image

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray.


Proof, explanation, and links to more optical illusions here:

http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelso ... usion.html
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Re: The Mind | Illusions + Magic

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Smithso | Teller Reveals His Secrets
The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind.
Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists—well intentioned as they are—are gathering soil samples from the foot of a mountain that magicians have mapped and mined for centuries. MRI machines are awesome, but if you want to learn the psychology of magic, you’re better off with Cub Scouts and hard candy.
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Re: The Mind | Illusions + Magic

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Re: The Mind | Human Nature + Illusions + Magic

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Re: The Mind | Human Nature + Illusions + Magic

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We Aren’t the World
If you take a broad look at the social science curriculum of the last few decades, it becomes a little more clear why modern graduates are so unmoored. The last generation or two of undergraduates have largely been taught by a cohort of social scientists busily doing penance for the racism and Eurocentrism of their predecessors, albeit in different ways. Many anthropologists took to the navel gazing of postmodernism and swore off attempts at rationality and science, which were disparaged as weapons of cultural imperialism.

Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

Henrich’s work with the ultimatum game was an example of a small but growing countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition. His new colleagues in the psychology department, Heine and Norenzayan, were also part of this trend. Heine focused on the different ways people in Western and Eastern cultures perceived the world, reasoned, and understood themselves in relationship to others. Norenzayan’s research focused on the ways religious belief influenced bonding and behavior. The three began to compile examples of cross-cultural research that, like Henrich’s work with the Machiguenga, challenged long-held assumptions of human psychological universality.
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Re: The Mind | Human Nature + Illusions + Magic

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