Stories by Stephen L. Macknik

This week is Brain Awareness Week 2015! A number of great events are taking place around the world to promote public education of the brain and to support research in neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Neural pathologies have shaped great art throughout history

I don't think that the reason people see the dress differently from each other is an interesting brain process. Rather, it is a mundane differences in how people have viewed the image on their electronic display screens (phones, tablets, laptops, etc).

The brain region underlying motivation and pleasure are directly interconnected in a loop that we neurophysiologists refer to as a circuit.

One of the very strange effects of reverse perspective is that the images seem to follow you as you pass by them. As if, while you are observing them, the pictures are watching you back.

iLuminate mixes dance, light, and computerized timing to create a unique amalgam of illusory perception. Imagine that all the neon in Times Square got together and performed Stomp.

Concentration affects how we detect and perceive objects and scenes

There's a new 8-week course available on visual perception taught by Dale Purves of Duke University. It's available for free and starts on January 7th, 2015.

Groh launches her book with a BIG FAT LIE: she tells us that nine-tenths of our brain power is spent determining where things are. Then she immediately admits that she just made that up, but that she'd dedicate the rest of the book to explaining why she thinks its true.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It may not have the cache of winter holidays or the Cash! Yay! of a birthday, but it is the best feel-good holiday of the year.

The facts and fictions of crimson perception

Today the Brookhaven National Lab turned on their new National Synchrotron Light Source II and saw its first emitted x-ray photon! http://www.bnl.gov/bwis/

Todd Sampson is an advertising exec in Australia. An average Joe, who, like the rest of us, wants to be super human . So he's enlisting scientists all over the world to hack his brain and make him, smarter, faster, and more creative.

Superpower your imagination

Portrait photography traverses fact and fancy

Hidden illusions are the Easter eggs of the mind

Take a visual journey through seven prizewinning illusions

Attend the ASU Origins Project Great Debate event, Transcending Our Origins--Violence, Humanity, and the Future, either live or by webcast on April 5th.

Despite tremendous differences in human versus shrimp eye structure and brain circuitry, the striking similarity between the color sensitivities of primate brain color-selective neurons and shrimp photoreceptors provides evidence of a common computational strategy across extremely divergent species.

An homage to David Hubel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist

I loved the book, and couldn't--wouldn't--didn't--set it down. With Influx, Daniel Suarez becomes the master, and Michael Crichton should be honored by the comparison.

Gianni Sarcone's illusions are beautiful and evocative of our most cherished emotion.

Scientists have studied a visual illusion first discovered by Galileo Galilei, and found that it occurs because of the surprising way our eyes see lightness and darkness in the world.

I disagree with this study's conclusion. Its not that I dont believe that low-income is tied to diabetes and hypoglycemia at the end of the pay cycle.