Don't believe what you believe you believe

Every once in a while I run into something that is so hard to believe that the impression it makes extends well beyond my expectations. Such is the case with the below optical illusion. Believe it or not, Square 'A' and Square 'B' are the exact same color. What's so delicious about this is how hopelessly lost our brain gets in navigating the sea of relativism that's created by a shadow on a checkerboard.



More intriguing is to force the brain to release the illusion and prove the sameness of color by connecting the 2 squares to reveal a continuous shade. Like this:



If you want the leave-no-doubt-about-it version then here's a video which crunches the 2 squares together:

http://tinyurl.com/ylknlgm


It makes you wonder: If this utterly convincing distortion of perception can happen visually, then there must be equally powerful distortions in other areas of our experience that we are also unaware of. And once we acknowledge that these illusions are part of our 'input' then we must be willing to take into account at least the possibility of such occurrences in any and all situations. It's a kind of back door into the realm of humility, I guess. A realization about how utterly wrong we can be about being... right. Something to think about.
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Spacing Out

Imagine the sense of validation I felt when I read the below article today:

Stop feeling guilty about daydreaming! According to a new study that scanned daydreaming brains, our minds appear to be most active when wandering. This accounts for moments of insight - those instances of coming up with solutions when we're not necessarily looking for them, which differs from analytical problem solving.

When we allow our brains to set their own courses, they activate several areas of problem solving at once - areas which don't usually work in unison and which alight on insightful solutions long before they become conscious.

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty," says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But, in looking at EEG recordings, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem."

So go ahead. Space out.