Stories by Stephen L. Macknik

Your brain fills in all kinds of visual gaps

Tomorrow (Tue 16th Dec at 8 am PST) the journal PeerJ will host a live Ask Me Anything session with us, and our collaborator Hector Rieiro (a PhD candidate in the Macknik Lab).

Horking down a huge honking burger--American style--is considered unladylike in Japan. So Freshness Burger uses an unconventional approach to maintaining Ochobo--the Japanese cultural practice of maintaining small delicate mouth features in women.

Stress is transient Type II diabetes, even when you’re otherwise healthy.

The brain's resources are limited. By focusing on angles, curves and line endings, your visual neurons can cut corners

An intriguing new paper in PLoS ONE by Haselhuhn and colleagues suggests that men with wide faces make you selfish.

We’re sitting in the front row of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, listening to the musicians warm up for the dress rehearsal of tonight’s benefit concert starring John Williams, his movie music, and guest starring Steven Spielberg.

For those of you who are in Israel today or tomorrow, come join us at The Gonda Center for free presentations on illusions and visual perception.

Trompe l'oeil illusions challenge your perception

Does size matter? To your brain, it doesn't

Staring at images can temporarily reset retinal cells and cause ghostly visions

You are more than a robot searching for food and mates

Spooky illusions trick and treat your brain

Colors can change with their surroundings and spread beyond the lines

The human brain is good at identifying faces, but illusions can fool our “face sense”

Illusions that distort your perception

What the leaning tower and related illusions reveal about how your brain constructs 3-D images

When seeing is believing

Fading illusions play hide-and-seek with your perception

Art and neuroscience combine to create fascinating examples of illusory motion

Face or food? The brain recognizes edible artwork on multiple levels

Artists find mind-bending ways to bring impossible figures into three-dimensional reality

Marketing illusions that make time fly

Eye gaze is critically important to social primates such as humans. Maybe that is why illusions involving eyes are so compelling