Perception
Psychology
26 rabbit holes · 16 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Are some people really tetrachromats?
- Who designed the running man on exit signs?
- Why are moths attracted to light?
- Why does cilantro taste like soap to some people?
- Why do tilt-shift photos look like miniatures?
Rabbit holes
- the blackest black, and the art world's pettiest feud
Vantablack is a forest of vertical carbon nanotubes that traps almost all visible light. When Anish Kapoor got exclusive artistic rights to the sprayable version, Stuart Semple responded by selling the 'pinkest pink' paint to everyone except Kapoor.
Elena Marchetti · 5 sources
- squares A and B are the same color and my brain refuses to accept it
Covered everything except the two squares with my hands: same grey. Took my hands away: different again. Knowing doesn't help at all. The dress was the same process, except people's brains assumed different lighting.
Jade Fontaine · 5 sources
- Diana Deutsch's auditory illusions
Loop a spoken phrase enough times and it starts to sound sung, and it never sounds like plain speech again. The tritone paradox is weirder: a pair of tones goes up for some people and down for others, apparently linked to the speech of the region they grew up in.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- the Hum: a low noise some people hear everywhere
Small percentage of people in places like Taos and Bristol report a constant low droning sound that others can't hear. Explanations range from industrial noise to spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. Nobody's fully pinned it down.
moth · 5 sources
- some women might see colors the rest of us can't
moth · 5 sources
- the running man on exit signs, and the pictograms everyone copies
moth · 7 sources
- why moths fly at lights (2024 answer)
moth · 5 sources
- cilantro tastes like soap to some people. it's (partly) genetic
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- the MP3 was fine-tuned on a Suzanne Vega song
Brandenburg kept testing his encoder on Tom's Diner because a single unaccompanied voice exposes every artifact. Early versions apparently made it sound terrible. Vega has been called 'the mother of the MP3'.
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- the Clearview font saga on US highway signs
Clearview was designed to fix how Highway Gothic's letters blur at night in headlights (the holes in letters like e and a fill in with glare). The FHWA approved it in 2004, withdrew the approval in 2016 saying later research didn't show a clear benefit, then restored it in 2018.
Marco Bianchi · 6 sources
- the invisible gorilla (one of the classics that actually replicates)
Count the passes by the players in white. In the original 1999 study, roughly half of people missed a person in a gorilla suit walking right through. I'd seen it before so I caught the gorilla, then their follow-up video got me with something else. You see what you're looking for.
Hannah Kim · 5 sources
- why tilt-shift photos make cities look like toys
Fern Achterberg · 5 sources
- the Parthenon has almost no straight lines
Columns bulge slightly, lean inward, and the floor curves up in the middle. All so the building looks straight to human eyes.
Lena Kowalski · 4 sources
- the Monopoly man doesn't have a monocle and I'm not ok
There's a 2022 study on the 'visual Mandela effect': people consistently misremember specific details of famous images (Pikachu's tail, the Monopoly man's monocle) in the same wrong way, even when they've seen the real thing many times. Then Loftus, and how easily memories get edited after the fact.
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- Houston's airport fixed baggage complaints by making people walk farther
The story (from a 2012 NYT piece): people complained about waiting at baggage claim, so the airport moved arrivals farther from the carousels. Same total time, but now most of it was spent walking, and the complaints mostly stopped.
moth · 4 sources
- mantis shrimp see more colors than us? turns out no
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- ink traps: notches cut into letters so they look normal when printed badly
Up close Bell Centennial looks like something took bites out of the corners. At phone-book size on cheap paper, the ink spreads into the notches and the letters come out clean. Design for the worst output, not the ideal one.
Fern Achterberg · 7 sources
- the McGurk effect: your eyes change what you hear
Audio says 'ba', the lips on screen say 'ga', and you hear 'da'. Close your eyes and it's 'ba' again. Open them, 'da'. I did this about fifteen times.
moth · 4 sources
- the uncanny valley is from a 1970 essay
Ayodele Bankole · 4 sources
- why did Homer call the sea wine-dark?
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- the second hand freezes when you first look at a clock
Hannah Kim · 6 sources
- why I keep seeing faces in electrical outlets
Started on r/Pareidolia, ended on why the brain has a region that's so into faces. The usual explanation is that a false alarm costs nothing and missing a real face costs a lot, so the detector is tuned to fire easily.
Tess Quinlan · 5 sources
- can fish feel pain?
Jade Fontaine · 4 sources
- petrichor: why rain smells like that
The earthy smell is mostly geosmin, made by soil bacteria, and humans are absurdly sensitive to it. Probably because finding water mattered a lot to our ancestors. Also: camels might use it the same way.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- can top violinists tell a Stradivarius from a new violin? mostly no
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- magenta isn't in the rainbow
Quinn Harlow · 6 sources