What part of the body do you listen with? The ear is the obvious answer, but it’s only part of the story - your skin is also involved.

When we listen to someone else speaking, our brain combines the sounds that our ears pick up with the sight of the speaker’s lips and face, and subtle changes in air movements over our skin. Only by melding our senses of hearing, vision and touch do we get a full impression of what we’re listening to. 

{ Not Exactly Rocket Science/ScienceBlogs Times | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

The experiment was extreme, certainly, but the neuroscientist behind the study, David Eagleman at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, is no Dr Strangelove. When we look back at scary situations, they often seem to have occurred in slow motion. Eagleman wanted to know whether the brain’s clock actually accelerates - making external events appear abnormally slow in comparison with the brain’s workings - or whether the slo-mo is just an artefact of our memory.

It’s just one of many mysteries concerning how we experience time that we are only now beginning to crack. “Time,” says Eagleman, “is much weirder than we think it is.”

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Another notable difference between sight and hearing concerns space. One of the most striking aspects of visual experience is its rich spatial content. We speak of a visual field, a panorama populated in detail with colours and shapes. In contrast, the notion of an auditory panorama is more foreign. Perhaps time is to audition what space is to vision.

{ Casey O’Callaghan/The Pilosophers’ Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Josef Hoflehner | via A Photography Blog }