#perception

#perception

Yes and no, says cognitive scientist Tomer Ullman, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology, who with Halely Balaban recently published a paper titled "The Capacity Limits of Moving Objects in the Imagination." If you're like most people, you probably thought about some of these things, but not others. People build mental imagery hierarchically, starting with the ideas of "person," "room," "ball," and "table," then placing them in relation to one another in space, and only later filling in details like color.

Are heroes real, or are they simply stories we tell ourselves? Either heroes are objectively real-brave people who perform extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice-or heroism is merely in our heads, a social construction shaped by culture, media, and wishful thinking. This debate shows up everywhere: in classrooms, in popular culture, and even among scholars who study heroism for a living.

You've encountered them: people who feel like life is an ongoing struggle filled with endless problems. Or perhaps this is how you feel. There are valid reasons to feel this way. When you think about your life, it may seem like it's only filled with pain, regret, and tragedy. It's easy to hear someone say, 'just be happy,' but that can sound dismissive and trivial; the person speaking clearly doesn't truly understand your pain, and at some level, they don't seem to care.

There is a shy, young man who finds a woman he knows extremely attractive. For months he has endeavored to work up the courage to ask her out, and finally... he does! To his great amazement, she says YES! The days leading up to the date, his thoughts are only on her. What her smile will look like, the touch of her hand in his. He walks about in a happy cloud of thoughts for days. The big day arrives. She looks as beautiful as he had imagined.

As part of the experiential context, the concept of exhibition in architecture is closely tied to perception. Understanding the user's journey, recognizing the properties and characteristics of each element, and revealing the methodology behind their operation are all vital aspects of the design and development process for these spaces. From equipment, furniture, and artworks to construction materials and technologies, architecture and interior design demonstrate an increasingly significant creative potential to develop solutions that merge historical, landscape, and social perspectives.

Consider what happens when you observe anything external to yourself. Light reflects off an object, travels through space, enters your eye, and triggers photoreceptor cells. These generate neural signals that journey through multiple processing stages in your visual cortex, integrate with other sensory information and memory, and finally produce the conscious experience of "seeing." That's extraordinary mediation. Multiple transformation layers where information gets filtered, compressed, interpreted, and reconstructed. By the time you "see" something, you're experiencing a highly processed representation, not the thing itself.

The word we focused on was scotoma, a term from ophthalmology that means a patch of blindness in the field of sight. Every human eye has one. It is the point where the optic nerve exits the retina and no image can form. We do not see the hole because the brain fills it in. Ralph Levinson, a retired ophthalmologist and our guest that week, called this "a profound statement on life and cognition."

Opening on November 14, 2025, at the gallery's Bikini Berlin location, this immersive showcase invites visitors to explore the intricate relationship between perception, stillness, and the malleable nature of time. Drawing inspiration from the phenomenon of chronostasis, where a fleeting moment appears to elongate, the exhibition encapsulates the delicate dance between motion and remembrance. Through their distinctive practices, Wirths and Flad illuminate how focused attention can metamorphose our experience of time itself.

It will be frustrating or worse when our contributions do not seem to be understood, accepted, or appreciated. We are wise to pay attention to how we are being perceived in personal life (e.g., how an in-law regards us as a parent), in professional life (e.g., how an administrator evaluates a project we created), and in community life (e.g., how family or friends react to a speech we present).

Awareness is both pervasive and subtle. Paradoxically, it is at once everywhere and seemingly nowhere. It's everywhere because you can't experience anything outside of awareness, pretty much by definition. In every direction, everything you see, hear, and feel is happening in awareness. You can't step out of awareness to see what the world would be like from outside it. Yet, because it's so omnipresent, it's easy to take for granted and miss.

All of Wise's subjects are looking up, though it's not clear at what - she suggests angels, and has cited El Greco's The Vision of Saint John as an influence - or perhaps UFOs, which constitute another of her "long-held fascinations."

This phenomenon is referred to as selective attention, and a famous study designed by Simons and Chabris (1999) demonstrated it quite well. For their research, these scientists showed a video to student volunteers featuring players passing basketballs back and forth, one team in white t-shirts, and the other team in black t-shirts. The viewers were instructed to count the passes between players wearing the white t-shirts.

"The man (person) behind the camera" refers to an observer or witness not only to the surrounding world, but also to one's own sensations, feelings, impulses, instincts, thoughts, and experiences. Seeing more than their external and internal environments, this observer has a higher level of awareness, the cognitive awareness of awareness, or meta-awareness. Within the animal world, humans have been described as uniquely being aware of being aware.

Emerging from the artist's meditative practice of lake kayaking, these compositions channel the phenomenology of being adrift: the body poised between two planes - sky above, reflection below - while light and color collapse the distinction between horizon and self. For Walhimer, kayaking is not simply recreation but a way of seeing, a durational practice that turns sky and water into an expanded field of perception.

As a runner, I have often imagined what it would be like to have super speed like the Flash or Quicksilver. Unfortunately for my super speed dreams, Kyle Hill has presented the fatal flaws of super speed. But while Hill did consider the problem of perception, he seems to have missed one practical problem with being a super speedster and that is how mentally exhausting (and boring) running a super speed could be. Kant can help explain this problem.

The exploration of color has deep implications for art, physics, and perception that date back centuries, engaging thinkers from Isaac Newton to contemporary scientists.

When we think of 'digital product design', it's tempting to frame it in terms of usability, engagement, or revenue. But those are surface-level outputs. Underneath, design decisions are time-shaping mechanisms.

The most obvious, omnipresent realities are often the hardest to see. For me, autism is that water; the invisible medium through which I experience life.

The apparatus uses optical principles combined with reverse engineering algorithms to disrupt the scanner's perception, intertwining tangible events, recorded fictions, and imagined scenes to blur the line between authenticity and artifice.

'With Every Step' consists of 146 wooden poles arranged to form an anamorphic message, visible only from a specific vantage point, emphasizing spatial engagement.

The ability to change one's perception is a key avenue to innovation. We need to break away from what is known to discover the unknown.

The definition of 'objective' versus 'subjective' can help categorize experiences based on their ability to represent the physical world accurately or inaccurately.

The philosopher Keith Frankish managed to turn a pickle jar into a profound question: What was your visual experience like when you first opened the fridge? Was there a blank in the middle of your visual field?

Our brains are wired to connect dots, even when they don't exist, and we're surprisingly poor at distinguishing between dramatized entertainment and objective reality.

The brain is a prediction machine and our perceptual experiences consist of our prior experiences as well as new data.

The future doesn't need more problem-solvers. It needs more perceptual designers.