Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You

human beings tend to blindly trust their perception, to the point of considering it to be shared by everyone.

Without thinking, does the black figure seem to be facing us, or does it have its back to us? Are you above it, or below? You’re hesitating…

Now look at the image below: the individual clearly seems to be facing us, their elbows leant on the barrier, and they’re located above you. And now that you have this image in mind, look at the first version of the image again. The interpretation you make of it will copy the scenario that image (a) led you to see, and now the black figure appears to be facing you at a low-angle shot

brain, which shelters our knowledge, operates through estimates. The outcome is that our knowledge of things and of the world is always relative.

something unreal has just happened. This is what we call “magic”.

perception goes through our senses first.

“We don’t see the world as it is, but rather as we are

The five senses and the brain obviously work together so that human beings can indeed perceive the world. But our eyes, our ears, our tongue and our skin are actually receptors which will transform signals reflected by the outside world (optical, acoustic, olfactory…) into electrical signals. It is these thousands of electrical signals that our brain will process and filter, and which will enable us to mentally reconstruct the world.

Isaac Asimov: the relativity of wrong. Contrary to popular belief, right and wrong are rarely ever absolute, but often rather relative.

: let’s imagine a croissant and a sweet cost 1 pound and 10 pennies. The croissant costs 1 pound more than the sweet. How much does the sweet cost? According to system 1, you will start by automatically thinking: “10 pence”. However, if you activate your system 2 and you take a sheet of paper and a pencil to note down the process, you’ll see that your initial and intuitive answer is wrong. The croissant actually costs £1.05 and the sweet £0.05.

The brain has a need to interpret the signals the world sends its way in order to create a coherent and stable representation of the latter.