#misdirection

#misdirection

In many Asian households, love and repair weren't always spoken-they were implied, indirect, and often left for us to interpret. This isn't what I advise for the next generation of Asian parents.

The illusion is the latest masterpiece from Olivier Redon, a French-American inventor, who has had his creations used in museums and on TV programmes around the world. For today's puzzles, I present five of Redon's most brilliant images. The challenge is to figure out how he managed to create them.

You know that sinking feeling when you realize you've been using a phrase that makes you sound less intelligent than you actually are? I had one of those moments a few years back during a pitch meeting for my startup. I was presenting to potential investors, and I kept saying "I think" before every point I made. "I think our user acquisition strategy will work."

Ever since our ancestors first stood upright and squinted at the horizon, we've been wired to notice patterns. A rustle in the grass might have meant a stalking predator. Dark clouds often meant rain. Those who made these connections and guessed that one thing caused another tended to survive. Over time, this ability to link events became one of our most significant evolutionary advantages. It's how we built tools, tamed fire, and eventually invented Wi-Fi.

In behavioral science, identity follows action. If you're generous, you'll begin to see yourself as generous. If you're a patient person, you'll come to see that as part of who you are. Over time, the brain will wire itself to repeat these patterns.

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.

In 2011, researchers Jason Tangen, Sean Murphy, and Matthew Thompson at the University of Queensland discovered a striking visual illusion while preparing a set of face images for a study. As they were going quickly through the faces to check their spatial alignment, they started noticing that the faces appeared highly distorted, almost cartoonish. They then realized that these distortions were most pronounced when the faces were flashed about 4-5 times per second in peripheral vision.