Can Seeing Make You "Deaf"?

"Concentrating attention on a visual task can render you momentarily 'deaf' to sounds at normal levels, reports a new UCL study funded by the Wellcome Trust," notes Medical News Today. "The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that the senses of hearing and vision share a limited neural resource. Brain scans from 13 volunteers found that when they were engaged in a demanding visual task, the brain response to sound was significantly reduced. Examination of people's ability to detect sounds during the visual demanding task also showed a higher rate of failures to detect sounds, even though the sounds were clearly audible and people did detect them when the visual task was easy." Read more.

Should Seeing Be Believing?

"Our vision and hearing aren't as reliable as we might think, according to a study by life scientists at UCLA," writes Medical News Today. "'Our basic sensory representation of the world -- how information from our eyes and ears is processed by neurons in the brain -- is inaccurate,' said Ladan Shams, an associate professor of psychology in the UCLA College and senior author of the research, which was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. 'We tend to view our senses as flawless and think that to see is to believe,' she said. 'So it's eye-opening to learn that our perceptions are flawed.' Shams and her colleagues conducted the research in part because there had never been a comprehensive study to examine whether humans' 'spatial localization' ability -- that is, whether we can immediately and accurately perceive where an object is located -- is as well-honed as we believe it to be." Read more.

Seeing Is Not as Simple as Black and White, Says Scientists

"While some things may be 'as simple as black and white,' this has not been the case for the circuits in the brain that make it possible for you to distinguish black from white," reports Medical News Today. "The patterns of light and dark that fall on the retina provide a wealth of information about the world around us, yet scientists still don't understand how this information is encoded by neural circuits in the visual cortex--a part of the brain that plays a critical role in building the neural representations that are responsible for sight. But things just got a lot clearer with the discovery that the majority of neurons in visual cortex respond selectivity to light vs dark, and they combine this information with selectivity for other stimulus features to achieve a detailed representation of the visual scene." Read more.

Understanding How We See and Don't See Movement

"Our brains are constantly barraged with sensory information, but have an amazing ability to filter out just what they need to understand what's going on around us," notes Medical News Today. "Stand still in a room and turn your eyes, and the same visual input feels perfectly normal. That's thanks to a complex process in our brain that tell us when and how to pay attention to sensory input. Specifically, we ignore visual input caused by our own eye movements. Now, researchers at The Rockefeller University have identified a similar process in flies, whose brains ignore visual input caused by their own flight turns. This advance will allow researchers to better understand how ongoing behavior influences visual perception."Read more.

Harvard Med Study Uncovers Another Level of Visual Perception

"Scientists have explored the complex puzzle of visual perception with increasing precision, discovering that individual neurons are tuned to detect very specific motions: up, but not down; right, but not left; and in all directions. These same neurons, which live in the brain's middle temporal visual area, are also sensitive to relative depth," notes Medical News Today. "Now a Harvard Medical School team led by Richard Born has uncovered key principles about the way those neurons work, explaining how the brain uses sensory information to guide the decisions that underlie behaviors. Their findings, reported in Neuron, illuminate the nature and origin of the neural signals used to solve perceptual tasks. Based on their previous work, the researchers knew that they could selectively interfere with signals concerning depth, while leaving the signals for direction of motion intact. They wanted to learn what happened next, after the visual information was received and used to make a judgment about the visual stimulus." Read more.

Why The Dress Was Black/Black and White/Gold at the Same Time

"The mother of the bride wore white and gold. Or was it blue and black?" asked the New York Times last week when the photograph of a dress worn by the bride's mother went viral. "From a photograph..., there was broad disagreement. A few days after the wedding...on the Scottish island of Colonsay, a member of the wedding band was so frustrated by the lack of consensus that she posted a picture of the dress on Tumblr, and asked her followers for feedback....Within a half-hour, her post attracted some 500 likes and shares. The photo soon migrated to Buzzfeed and Facebook and Twitter, setting off a social media conflagration that few were able to resist. As the debate caught fire across the Internet — even scientists could not agree on what was causing the discrepancy — media companies rushed to get articles online. Less than a half-hour after Ms. McNeil’s original Tumblr post, Buzzfeed posted a poll: 'What Colors Are This Dress?' As of Friday afternoon, it had been viewed more than 28 million times. (White and gold was winning handily.) At its peak, more than 670,000 people were simultaneously viewing Buzzfeed’s post. Between that and the rest of Buzzfeed’s blanket coverage of the dress Thursday night, the site easily smashed its previous records for traffic. So did Tumblr." Read more.

The Times came up with an easy to understand explanation. It's optically fun. See the explanation.

People with High IQs Have Better Perception

“Optical illusions have long been used in neuroscience to point out perceptions into how the brain functions, and now a visual test can detect impaired abilities to see large motions in high-IQ people, according to a new study,” according to a post on Medical News Today. “The finding, published in Current Biology reveals that people who have high IQ scores process sensory information differently. The brains of people with high IQ were automatically more selective when they perceived objects in motion. More specifically, they are more likely to suppress larger and less important background motion.” Read more.

How Does the Brain Keep Color Perception Stable? The Answer

"Vision is amazing because it seems so mundane. Peoples' eyes, nerves and brains translate light into electrochemical signals and then into an experience of the world around them," reports MedicalNewsToday. "A close look at the physics of just the first part of this process shows that even seemingly simple tasks, like keeping a stable perception of an object's color in different lighting conditions or distinguishing black and white objects, is, in fact, very challenging. University of Pennsylvania psychologists, by way of a novel experiment, have now provided new insight into how the brain tackles this problem." Read more.  The "research will be published in the journal Current Biology."

The Illusion Found in Perception

"Although our eyes record the word as millions of pixels, 'the visual system is fantastic at giving us a world that looks like objects, not pixels,' says Northwestern University psychologist Steven L. Franconeri. It does this by grouping areas of the world with similar characteristics, such as color, shape, or motion," according to MedicalNewsToday. "The process is so seamless that we feel we're taking it all in simultaneously. But this, says a new study by Franconeri and his colleague Brian R. Levinthal, is 'an illusion.' Instead, they say, that for some types of grouping, the visual system is limited by its ability to perceive only one group at a time. The findings were just published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science." Read more.