When seeing is not really believing: How neural adaptation can deceive us

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When seeing is not really believing: How neural adaptation can deceive us

It’s a misty morning in 380 B.C. Greece, and Aristotle is taking his daily stroll along a flowing brook. Eventually he stops and observes the water, letting his eyes soften their focus on its motion. When he finally rips his gaze away, he notices that the stationary rocks around the brook seem to be moving in his gaze, as if they’re floating upstream! He quickly jots this observation down: “the senses are affected in this way when they turn quickly from objects in motion, e.g. from looking at a river and especially from looking at swiftly flowing streams. For objects at rest then seem to be in motion.” 

What Aristotle had experienced so many years ago, was something we now call the motion-aftereffect (MAE). The MAE, sometimes called the waterfall effect because of its origin of discovery, is a visual illusion that occurs after our eyes focus on a moving visual stimulus for about 10 milliseconds to a minute, and when we look away, we observe stationary objects moving in the opposite direction of the moving stimulus.

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Supersensors: How the loss of one sense impacts the others

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Supersensors: How the loss of one sense impacts the others

Would you ever voluntarily give up one of your senses? Turns out, the answer for an ever-increasing number of people is yes (albeit only temporarily). Novelty concepts such as dining in the dark have risen in popularity over the past decade; restaurant-goers frequently give up their sense of sight as a way to have a “heightened” mealtime experience. Most of these diners believe that their temporary blindness intensifies their other sensations - but how would a more permanent loss of sensation affect the ways we perceive our world?

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Lighting the Way: Project Prakash Opens Our Eyes to a World of Humanitarian Research

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Lighting the Way: Project Prakash Opens Our Eyes to a World of Humanitarian Research

In America, we all know Helen Keller. But we don’t know the more than 200,000 blind children in India. We don’t know that blind children in India do not go to school; that many end up begging on the streets (if they are of the “lucky” half that survives past the age of five). We don’t know that many of these blind children have easily curable disorders, like cataracts. But Pawan Sinha, founder of Project Prakash (meaning “light” in Sanskrit), saw what we have all been blind to. He saw a chance to help these children by providing free medical treatment to restore their vision. However, because the brain's ability to process visual information emerges early in development, there was one question that Project Prakash would need to answer: After removing cataracts from an older child, would the brain still possess the ability to learn how to interpret visual signals in order to recognize objects?

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