Category Archives: perception

in 2001 university of wisconsin researchers Maris and Bach-y-Rita found that people born blind could understand when the visual field was mapped to a gridded array of electrodes worn on the tongue, suggesting that the brain is capable of plastic mapping of images from one sense to another. prior research had shown that vision could […]

we have a long history of using touch for therapy, but until now there was little proof of the medical effect of touch. researchers using a functionalMRI to observe activity in the brain report that acupuncture calms sensory, cognitive and emotional processing and can reduce pain. needles can also reduce migraines, but it doesn’t matter […]

the music we listen to can have a direct impact on our hearts – especially for trained musicians. slow music tends to slow heart rate, and fast music tends to speed it up. and, it’s becoming possible to channel sound directly to the body without going through the ears. the buttkicker is an acoustic actuator […]

my old mit perception ta josh mcdermott and mark hauser propose that humans evolved to prefer consonant sounds over dissonant sounds. the way they show it is by placing monkeys in a V-shaped maze with musical chords playing at one end and cacophonous tones at the other. while monkeys prefer soft sounds to loud ones […]

after reading about how a blue stripe on the walls of prison cells could promote truthfulness, i tried to find out about the elusive field of color psychology. it turns out that there is very little direct connection between color and emotion: it seems to vary widely between cultures and individuals. for example, the color […]