Continuing with the brain science tangent I started previously; while I was searching for the McGurk effect video, I stumbled upon a show from the National Geographic channel called  "Test Your Brain". This made me happy for several reasons.

First, it restores a tiny bit of the respect I lost for National Geographic, after they launched their own Monster Quest-like paranormal show called Chasing UFO's, earlier this year. Although, it looks as though Test Your Brain may only have aired on the UK version of the channel. It's hard to tell, since the American Nat Geo Channel page is crap, and doesn't even list shows I know are on the damn channel in it's list of shows. Second, as you may have noticed, I kind of have a thing for the brain. Ya know, in a science-y kind of way. It's not like a sex thing... Although... No, definitely not a sex thing.

Point is, I think it's a well produced, entertaining, and even interactive show, that, if nothing else does a really good job of demonstrating and explaining the vast majority of the phenomena it discusses. Although, they do use a bit of hypnosis in one episode, which I think they could have spent a bit more time explaining. There are currently 3 full episodes up on YouTube; Pay Attention, Perception, and Memory- though I suspect Nation Geographic will remedy this soon enough. So if you're interested, go watch.

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Your brain lies. Not all the time of course, but more often than most people would probably like to think. I talk about this a little on the last episode of the show and actually mentioned this particular demonstration, though I couldn't remember the name of it at the time. It's called the McGurk effect, and It was first described in 1976 in a paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald entitled "Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices". This illusion is a demonstration of one of the many ways in which your perception can be fooled, as your brain attempts to make sense of the visual and auditory stimuli it receives. It's a cool little effect, in which your brain actually changes the sound you hear based on the image it's being paired with. But the McGurk effect is just one of the many ways in which your brain can misrepresent the reality of the world around you, and it isn't even a particularly extreme example at that.

Image: Edward H Adelson

Take the colored squares illusion, which you've probably already seen in one form or another. This illusion is a more extreme example of your brain altering your perception to try and make sense of the reality in front of it. In this example, despite the fact that they look like completely different shades of grey, the A and B squares in the illustration are actually the same color. No, really. If you've never seen it before it's hard to believe. So I encourage you to throw the image into your image editor of choice and compare. It's awesome. Weird, but awesome. This illusion works primarily because of the shading, perspective, and various other perceived visual cues in the image. Your brain interprets these cues and determines the image to be a 3 dimensional one, adjusting the colors accordingly in the process. It's all more technical than that of course, and you can go HERE for a more detailed explanation of this particular illusion. But the important thing to understand about these illusions and others like them, is that they actually demonstrate what are otherwise undetectable flaws in our perception of the world around us.

But for most of us, the most poorly understood yet overly trusted function of the brain, has to be memory. Because as difficult as it may be to either accept for yourself, or to try and convince someone else that our perception of an event or phenomena could be the result of a failure to understand a fundamental flaw or limitation of our brains. The notion that even the most vivid memories in all our heads are not only flawed and contaminated, but in many cases outright false, seems all but impossible. But this too is true, as more and more studies have continued to show.

Memories exist in our brain as a combination of neural connections and chemicals, that I can't pretend to fully understand. But what matters, is that the brain doesn't actually function as hard drive, like most people imagine it to, and memories are not permanent fixtures in the brain as most people perceive them. Memories are malleable, highly susceptible to contamination, and become more distorted and degraded with time, outside influence, and recollection. Which are facts I think more people should be aware of, particularly given the importance still afforded to things like eye witness accounts as evidence in criminal trials. Or, somewhat more trivially, as justification for belief in religious, supernatural, or other unexplainable phenomena.

The point of this particular rambling, is not to impress you with my extensive academic understanding of brain science, particularly since I don't have any. Like most of the things I write about, attempting to better understand how the mind and our ability to perceive reality actually works, is just another in a long list of intellectual  topics, with which I am somewhat obsessed. My goal, was really just to make the point that I think it would do ourselves and the world in general an immeasurable amount of good, if everyone spent just the tiniest bit of their lives at least attempting to better understand how the engine that allows one to perceive and experience the world around us actually functions, rather than blindly following false assumptions. What can I say, I guess I'm just not a fan of blind faith. Who would have guessed?

This Image is NOT animated

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Neil shows up in Action Comics #14, to help superman find Krypton. Which, it turns out,

“is found 27.1 light-years from Earth, in the southern constellation Corvus (The Crow), orbiting  the red dwarf star LHS 2520, which is cooler and smaller than our sun.”

Just in case you’re not sure, comic books aren’t real, so neither is planet Krypton. Though its a safe bet that it will be someday, in name anyway, should we ever actually find a planet orbiting LHS 2520, which is a real life star, located 2.7 years from Earth, ETC, Etc.

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VIA:Scientific American

So, as I kind of expected would be the case, technology conspired against my desire to make a Halloween episode. I mean, ya we made one, and it was amazing. In fact, it was probably the single greatest podcast ever recorded, EVER. Unfortunately, Skype was in a mood, and the resulting audio quality made it unusable, so You'll just have to take my word for it. Besides, by the time I actually finish posting this it should be just about midnight anyway. Instead, here's the second show Tara and I recorded, which is actually my favorite episode thus far. Although, it is at least a little Halloween-y I guess, since we do spend quite some time talking about the paranormal.

In today's episode, " Poor Little Doodle": Kesha's (Yes, I know she spells it with a "$", but I refuse) sexual encounter with a ghost, sleep paralysis, alien abduction and the paranormal -the recent death of a man at a South FL bug eating contest -a Florida man with a little too much love for livestock- a Texas school's decision to track children with RFID chips- and learning to look at life from the perspective of us freaks.

Our favorite things this week: Tara Snags a free wide angle lens for her phone's camera, and I share a story about a very special lady...

Enjoy.
 
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Oddly enough, I am actually not a huge fan of horror movies; at least not to the extent that most people like to assume I'll be. But I do love gore and Anthrax, and I've always had a thing for visual effects. So this show encompasses MANY of my favorite things, and I like it.

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