When I teach students about the brain, I always start with some visual illusions. One of the reasons for this is how counter-intuitive some of them are.  After viewing a couple, it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that we see with our brain not just with our eyes.

That’s why I love this study about how vision affects cognition.  The study takes a bunch of snooty, very well trained wine tasters. These guys are paid to write long poetic reviews about the way a wine smells.  As WinePro.org tells us

The nose can sometimes even beat the eyes in the race for setting up the tasting expectations. An aroma can carry from one room to another, beyond the line of sight. Of the five senses, smell is the most acute, approximately 1,000 times more sensitive than the sense of taste. As a result, what is termed flavor is influenced by roughly 75% smell (olfaction) and 25% taste (gustation) in healthy individuals.

To sum up: the nose knows.  Now, apparently there is a very specialized vocabulary regarding the smells (aromas? ) of wine.  The smell of red wines and white wines are often described in different languages.  In fact if you want to sound snooty when describing your wine you can even order a wine aroma wheel and use it to construct sentences like “”Intense aromas of ginger, citrus, candied berry and multigrain bread turn to honey, roasted almonds and graphite on the palate.”  To sum up, the nose of a wine taster, knows more then your nose.

So what happens when researchers used am oderless, tasteless liquid to change the color of white wine red?

It turns out that the experts use the red-wine language to describe the fake red-wine.  All those years of gently quaffing their glasses, inhaling deeply and donning mysterious looks of profound insight, meant little in the face of a couple drops of food coloring.  The information from the eyes, in this case, simply overruled the information from the nose.

It’s just another subtle but fun case of the brain adjudicating reality for us.

A fascinating short blog post from Brain Blogger.  More kids are receiving psychotropic drugs. What role, if any, should teachers play in this?  This is the quote that jumped out at me:

more than half the parents seeking medication treatment for their child’s externalizing behavior in one pediatric setting were doing so as the result of recommendations from school personnel.” Yet, the teachers in their study responded that they had “none or limited” (88.9% and 100% respectively) training on children’s mental health problems or the medications prescribed to treat them.

Teachers make recommendations that lead parents to seek medication.  It seems to me that we have to do a better job of training teachers to deal with behavior issues in the classroom, while at the same time deepening the societal discussion around the use of medication.

Check out this image. Up close we see Albert Einstein.  But vision like other things can be relative.  Now stand up, walk to other side of the room and take another look.  

Strange huh? It turns out that our visual system is designed to pick up different levels of detail at different distances. Up close we pick up fine details. At a distance we pick up coarse details.  This can allow us to see the image above as two completely different images.  Read this article from the great neurophilosophy blog to get more information on this interesting phenomenon.

Oh Sweet Jesus….. Yes, look closely into the Kit-Kat bar. Who do you see? 

I don’t know why I love this so much. Maybe it’s becuase it reminds me of  Dali’s brilliant  ”Gala Contermplating the Mediterranean Which at Twenty Meters Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln.” 

More likely it’s because I’ve always had a thing for icons spotted in mundane objects.