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 Don't You See Your Blind Spot?
Each eye has a patch with no light receptors, yet you never see a hole. Mariotte's 1668 discovery, a try-it-yourself demonstration, what cells in the visual cortex of monkeys do at the gap, Troxler fading, and the open argument over whether the brain paints the gap in or simply never registers it. Graded Strong to No evidence.
Read →Why Doesn't the World Jump When Your Eyes Move?
Your eyes jump several times a second, yet the room holds still. Saccadic suppression, the stopped-clock illusion, the brain's internal copy of each eye movement, and why a scene shifted mid-jump can go unnoticed. Graded Strong to No evidence.
Read →Why Does the Moon Look Bigger on the Horizon?
The rising moon casts the same image in your eye as the moon high overhead, yet it can look enormous. Apparent distance, the size-distance paradox, angle of regard and relative size: what a century of experiments shows, and why the moon illusion still has no single agreed explanation. Graded Strong to No evidence.
Read →How Much Can You See in a Single Glance?
A flashed scene is enough to tell a beach from a kitchen, and the brain sorts animal from no-animal photographs before you have decided anything. But a glance gives you the kind of place, not a photograph of it. Rapid gist, the contested race to the fastest presentation rates, and the open argument over whether perception is rich or sparse. Graded Strong to No evidence.
Read →Does Language Change the Colours You See?
Russian has two basic words where English has one, and Russian speakers are measurably faster across that boundary — until you give their language system something else to do, at which point the advantage vanishes. The effect that shows up in only half the visual field, the fieldwork that cut against the universalist story, and why the size of all this is genuinely unsettled. Graded Moderate to No evidence.
Read →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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