When most people think about psychology, they think about psychopathology – about depression, psychosis, and multiple personality disorder – or about clinical interventions to help troubled couples and families stop fighting with one another. But psychology also deals with the fascinating, and often equally mysterious, workings of the normal brain.
We take the normal functioning of our brains for granted. It feels simple from the inside, like my eyes and ears projecting photos and videos straight back to the brain, which then quickly decides whether I am currently watching a Volkswagen ad during the Super Bowl or dancing with Jennifer Lopez’s beautiful cousin on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
But the reality is actually much different from that, and much more amazing. Your brain gets bombarded with a continual stream of sometimes confusing and misleading neural sparks, and has to engage in some amazing calculational feats to make sense of it all.
We can really appreciate how magnificent the process is by seeing what happens when it breaks down. If we examine puzzling visual illusions we can get an idea of how the brain normally does its work.
Read more at Psychology Today
