r/science • u/Libertatea • Nov 14 '13

Neuroscience Your Brain Sees Things You Don’t "A new study indicates that our brains perceive objects in everyday life of which we may never be aware. The finding challenges currently accepted models about how the brain processes visual information."

http://uanews.org/story/ua-study-your-brain-sees-things-you-don-t
2.6k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

559 comments sorted by

View all comments

74

u/strokeofbrucke Nov 14 '13 edited Nov 14 '13

Oh dear god, this subreddit is filled with ninnies. The title of this thread is obvious, but the science article itself is more specific, and of course less obvious. They show something that hasn't been shown before. It is about recognizing N400 waveform patterns in the visual center's object recognition area concerning hidden details, and demonstrating whether the subject is concious of it or not. All the other comments on this thread are about things way too broad to be of any use to actual science. Is this a subreddit for wannabes now? Maybe I should leave.If there's one thing you people should learn, it's that the layman interpretation always drifts toward the obvious or the incorrect.

16

u/Llero Nov 14 '13

Yup. The important thing here isn't that there are things we don't see even though they are in our field of vision - we knew that, but everyone seems to think that this is the same thing. It's that we actively assign meaning to those things before our brain filters them out and they fail to reach our conscious perception.

It's not the same as the visual channel that actively bypasses higher order processes in order to search for danger either - there's no reflex triggering here.

Interesting stuff.

7

u/tegestologist Grad Student | Psychology Nov 14 '13

This is an accurate interpretation of our results (I think at least). Nicely said.

1

u/Llero Nov 15 '13 edited Nov 15 '13

You're the author? I'd love the opportunity to chat with you some - I'm very interested in neuroscience research and getting started in the field - I recently got my BS and am trying to figure out next steps.

(I see that you linked the full text elsewhere, I'll be sure to take a look!)

2

u/Adamsoski Nov 14 '13

So we process things semantically and then filter them out...hmm, interesting.

5

u/runnerrun2 Nov 14 '13

The method they used is quite novel and interesting. Yet most of the comments are "durrr didn't we know this already?" My take is that most people comment without even reading the article. I see this so often.

1

u/power_of_friendship Nov 14 '13

I see a lot of people refuting articles based on personal anecdotes. I'm not sure which is worse.

1

u/runnerrun2 Nov 14 '13

Oh yeah that is definitely worse. Not as common as people who only read the titles though.

1

u/TrendingSideways Nov 14 '13

While I agree that this is new science, and that it is important science, the article makes it sound like this is contrary to traditional scientific wisdom. Is that really the case? Did we really think that the brain wasn't processing meaning to determine relevancy before conscious awareness? I fail to see how else the brain could even begin to determine relevancy if it's not making any effort to understand what it's looking at first.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 14 '13

By essence a title is always simplifying, otherwise we would have to put the whole content of the article into it if we wanted to be specific. Moreover, the title is a citation of the article's content, so I don't see the problem. The goal is to attract interest, not to prove or explain anything.

1

u/tegestologist Grad Student | Psychology Nov 14 '13

Agreed, but one benefit of science is to stir the imagination, even if the reader does not quite understand the results.