You Can't Always Trust Your Brain

 This section of Incognito addresses innovations in brain technology. I'm against animal testing, mostly. In all applications, it causes suffering, and in so many cases, it produces no valuable outcomes, But I also recognize that some animal testing has led to incredible medical advances. Whenever possible, animal testing should be avoided, but there are some applications where I'm torn. Here's an example. Mice are apparently color blind, but some have been genetically modified in an experiement that resulted in the mice being able to discern between red and blue. Incredible. I already know that there are many colors on the spectrum that humans are incapable of perceiving. What I just learned from this book is that about 10% of women have a genetic mutation where instead of three color receptors, they have four, and are thus able to perceive colors the rest of us cannot. I really wish the author had gone further into this. Maybe later. There's speculation that humans, through brain enhancements, may be able to see infrared. I actually have a colleague who researches brain/computer interfaces. Wild stuff!!

The brain has many sensory inputs, with sight as just one of them. It works to intrepret them, but sometimes the brain can be tricked. One trick is called the McGurk Effect. I had heard of this before, so I looked up a video of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSjOXyutkCM. Other examples are also given by the author. The reason the brain does this isn't because it's flawed. This aspect of brain wiring allows the brain to function predictively. Hitting a tennis ball is used as an example. Visually, we'd never be able to do it, but there are aspects of physics that become hardwired over time that allow us to react predictively, making us much faster than merely the sensory inputs would allow.

It's not just visual and auditory sensory. Time is another construct that the brain toys with. If I give you a button to press and it causes a flash, but I set the flash to go a fraction of a second after, your brain will adjust after a few clicks so they seem to be synchronous. If I then secretly modify the button so that the flash happens at the same time, you'll perceive the flash to occur before you click the button.

You can't always trust your brain. 



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