The Right Brain blog
How we see, explained.
Calm, science-first reading on perception and attention — what the research actually shows, graded against the evidence from Strong to Contested. The name is a metaphor; the science is real.
Why What You Hear Changes What You See
A face saying ga, a voice saying ba, and most people hear da — a syllable nobody produced, and knowing the trick does not switch it off. Sound splitting a single flash into two, the senses weighted by reliability rather than ranked, and the huge individual variation the popular version leaves out. Graded Strong to No evidence.
Read →Why You Recognise People by the Way They Walk
A dozen dots on a black screen. Freeze them and observers see a meaningless scatter; set them moving and a person appears in under a second — and sometimes a person you know. Fifty years of point-light walkers, the inversion signature it shares with faces, and why the pattern is the unit. Graded Strong to Early.
Read →Why Flat Pictures Look Three-Dimensional
A photograph has no depth in it, and you see depth anyway. That isn't a trick — the third dimension is missing from the signal your eyes receive too, so seeing is always a reconstruction. The cues, which ones a picture can't fake, and what the Ames room proves. Graded Strong to Moderate.
Read →Why People Saw The Dress Differently
One photograph, two camps, no filter and no trick. Your visual system never reports the light that hit your eye — it subtracts an estimate of the illumination and reports the object. Strip the clues away and two competent systems reach opposite answers. Graded Strong to Early.
Read →Why You Can't Find Your Keys
They were on the table the whole time. Visual search isn't a sweep — it's a guided guess, and the guidance is what fails. Feature vs. conjunction search, why rare things get missed, and why re-checking the same wrong spot is close to the system's default. Graded Strong to Contested.
Read →Why You See Faces in Things
Plug sockets, car fronts, burnt toast. Pareidolia isn't an overactive imagination — it's a face system tuned to fire fast and forgive false alarms, firing in about a sixth of a second. The inversion effect, the Thatcher illusion, and the argument still running underneath. Graded Strong to Contested.
Read →Why Optical Illusions Fool Everyone
Illusions aren't glitches in your eyes — they're your brain's best guess, showing its work. Kanizsa's phantom triangle, the checker-shadow, misapplied constancies, and the key point: knowing it's an illusion doesn't switch it off. Graded Strong to Contested.
Read →Attention vs. Perception: What's the Difference?
You can look straight at something and not see it. The invisible gorilla, change blindness, feature binding, and how attention can quietly shape what you perceive — a calm tour of where seeing and attending part ways. Graded Strong to Moderate.
Read →Do Brain-Training Games Actually Work? What the Evidence Says
You get better at the game — but does it carry to real life? Practice effects vs. transfer, the famous BBC and working-memory null results, the rare exceptions, and why Right Brain has no "brain score." Graded Strong to Contested.
Read →Peripheral Awareness: What Your Side Vision Is Actually Doing
Low acuity, crowding, and the attention-bound "useful field of view" — what your peripheral vision really does, the one training result that holds up, and where the claims overreach. Graded Strong to Contested.
Read →Gestalt Perception: How the Mind Groups What You See
Proximity, similarity, figure-ground, and edges your mind invents from nothing — a calm tour of how perception organises a scene into wholes, graded Strong to Contested, with the transfer question left open.
Read →Open vs. Focused Attention: The Science of Seeing the Whole at a Glance
Two modes of attention — narrow and open — and the perception science of ensemble coding and global precedence, graded Strong to Contested, with the transfer question left open.
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