A few chapters back in our Psychology textbook (Chapter 9, maybe?) we learned about how human memory works and why it sometimes doesn't work as well as we'd like it to. Anyway, I read an article today about memory ,perception , and how they sometimes work togethor to trick us into thinking we saw something that didn't happen.
Both human memory and perception are very easy to fool. When we look at something, our brains have to figure out what we're seeing. For example, if we see a house that looks smaller than a person, it's most likely because the house is farther away from us and not because the house really is smaller than that person. At the same time, our memory can only store a limited number of memories. Our brains use logic to piece togethor what we don't remember. Sometimes we mess up.
Helene Intraub and Christopher A. Dickinson of the University of Delaware did a study where they flashed pictures briefly to people, and then showed the pictures again, except that they were either zoomed out, zoomed in, or the same. The researchers then asked the subjects if the second picture was the same or zoomed in or zoomed out. It turns out that everyone thought the second picture was zoomed in even if it was exactly the same. That means people created false memories, and get this: they did so in less than a second!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=perception-and-memory
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5 comments:
That is crazy. Who would have thought that a mind would forget that quickly. Maybe its because our brains don't feel a need to remember such information, or the people weren't paying that much attention because they weren't very interested.
Thats pretty freaky!! its kinda disturbing to know that our perception can be tricked so easily. I also wonder about that study. lol i would really like to have participated!! good blog it was really interesting.
Oh no my mind is playing tricks on me. i think its weird to think of the mind separate from our own consciousness as if it has its own agenda. Very insightful article
This is really interesting, and that seems like a very cool experiment. Good job!
Wowww! That's all very interesting. I had no idea our minds worked that way and could be tricked...that's kind of unfortunate. =\
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