Mental Health Problems Relating to Perception May be Solved by Scientists with the help of a Time Travel Illusion

Mental Health Problems Relating to Perception May be Solved by Scientists with the help of a Time Travel Illusion
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Various kinds of information bombard us every second of every day. This is okay as long as our brain manages to make sense of all this information. It is possible that our brain cannot register all the information that is being thrown at it. What happens then? Luckily, some researchers have come up with a trick, an illusion (auditory and visual) which can trick the brain to somehow travel back in time to fill in the things it may have missed.

The phenomenon in question is called postdiction and it refers to where the stimulus can alter the way we think back to what we heard or seen in the past. Something similar is represented by the Invisible Rabbit illusions and the Illusory Rabbit. Noelle Stiles from Caltech (California Institute of Technology had this to say: “How does the brain determine reality with information from multiple senses that is at times noisy and conflicting? The brain uses assumptions about the environment to solve this problem. When these assumptions happen to be wrong, illusions can occur as the brain tries to make the best sense of a confusing situation. We can use these illusions to unveil the underlying inferences that the brain makes”.

Shinsuke Shimojo is a senior researcher at Caltech and he said that “The significance of this study is twofold”. At first, postdiction is generalized as a key factor during the processing of perceiving either a single sense or multiple senses. The second significance is given by the fact that these illusions are rare cases where vision is affected by sound and not the other way around. This indicates that across space and time our neural processing is quite dynamic.


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I am a pop culture and social media expert. Aside from writing about the latest news health, I also enjoy pop culture and Yoga. I have BA in American Cultural Studies and currently enrolled in a Mass-Media MA program. I like to spend my spring breaks volunteering overseas.

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