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Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain View Larger Image | Tom Stafford, Matt Webb
O'Reilly Media, Paperback, Published November 2004, 363 pages, ISBN 0596007795 | List Price: $24.95
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Hack 65: Why Can't You Tickle Yourself
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The brain is a fearsomely complex information-processing environment--one that
often eludes our ability to understand it. At any given time, the brain is collecting,
filtering, and analyzing information and, in response, performing countless
intricate processes, some of which are automatic, some voluntary, some conscious,
and some unconscious.
Cognitive neuroscience is one of the ways we have to understand the workings
of our minds. It's the study of the brain biology behind our mental functions:
a collection of methods--like brain scanning and computational modeling--combined
with a way of looking at psychological phenomena and discovering where, why,
and how the brain makes them happen.
Want to know more? Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment
works of the brain. Using cognitive neuroscience, these experiments, tricks,
and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, subliminal perception,
and more throw light on how the human brain works. Each "hack" examines specific
operations of the brain. By seeing how the brain responds, we pick up clues
about the architecture and design of the brain, learning a little bit more about
how the brain is put together.
Mind Hacks begins your exploration of the mind with a look inside the
brain itself, using hacks such as "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Turn On
and Off Bits of the Brain" and "Tour the Cortex and the Four Lobes." Also among
the 100 hacks in this book, you'll find:
- Release Eye Fixations for Faster Reactions
- See Movement When All is Still
- Feel the Presence and Loss of Attention
- Detect Sounds on the Margins of Certainty
- Mold Your Body Schema
- Test Your Handedness
- See a Person in Moving Lights
- Make Events Understandable as Cause-and-Effect
- Boost Memory by Using Context
- Understand Detail and the Limits of Attention
Steven Johnson, author of "Mind Wide Open" writes in his foreword to the book,
"These hacks amaze because they reveal the brain's hidden logic; they shed light
on the cheats and shortcuts and latent assumptions our brains make about the
world." If you want to know more about what's going on in your head, then Mind
Hacks is the key--let yourself play with the interface between you and the
world.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Credits
Preface
Chapter 1. Inside the Brain
1. Find Out How the Brain Works Without Looking Inside
2. Electroencephalogram: Getting the Big Picture with EEGs
3. Positron Emission Tomography: Measuring Activity Indirectly
with PET
4. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: The State of
the Art
5. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Turn On and Off Bits
of the Brain
6. Neuropsychology, the 10% Myth, and Why You Use All of
Your Brain
7. Get Acquainted with the Central Nervous System
8. Tour the Cortex and the Four Lobes
9. The Neuron
10. Detect the Effect of Cognitive Function on Cerebral
Blood Flow
11. Why People Don't Work Like Elevator Buttons
12. Build Your Own Sensory Homunculus
Chapter 2. Seeing
13. Understand Visual Processing
14. See the Limits of Your Vision
15. To See, Act
16. Map Your Blind Spot
17. Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision
18. When Time Stands Still
19. Release Eye Fixations for Faster Reactions
20. Fool Yourself into Seeing 3D
21. Objects Move, Lighting Shouldn't
22. Depth Matters
23. See How Brightness Differs from Luminance: The Checker
Shadow Illusion
24. Create Illusionary Depth with Sunglasses
25. See Movement When All Is Still
26. Get Adjusted
27. Show Motion Without Anything Moving
28. Motion Extrapolation: The "Flash-Lag Effect"
29. Turn Gliding Blocks into Stepping Feet
30. Understand the Rotating Snakes Illusion
31. Minimize Imaginary Distances
32. Explore Your Defense Hardware
33. Neural Noise Isn't a Bug; It's a Feature
Chapter 3. Attention
34. Detail and the Limits of Attention
35. Count Faster with Subitizing
36. Feel the Presence and Loss of Attention
37. Grab Attention
38. Don't Look Back!
39. Avoid Holes in Attention
40. Blind to Change
41. Make Things Invisible Simply by Concentrating (on Something
Else)
42. The Brain Punishes Features that Cry Wolf
43. Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games
Chapter 4. Hearing and Language
44. Detect Timing with Your Ears
45. Detect Sound Direction
46. Discover Pitch
47. Keep Your Balance
48. Detect Sounds on the Margins of Certainty
49. Speech Is Broadband Input to Your Head
50. Give Big-Sounding Words to Big Concepts
51. Stop Memory-Buffer Overrun While Reading
52. Robust Processing Using Parallelism
Chapter 5. Integrating
53. Put Timing Information into Sound and Location Information
into Light
54. Don't Divide Attention Across Locations
55. Confuse Color Identification with Mixed Signals
56. Don't Go There
57. Combine Modalities to Increase Intensity
58. Watch Yourself to Feel More
59. Hear with Your Eyes: The McGurk Effect
60. Pay Attention to Thrown Voices
61. Talk to Yourself
Chapter 6. Moving
62. The Broken Escalator Phenomenon: When Autopilot Takes
Over
63. Keep Hold of Yourself
64. Mold Your Body Schema
65. Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?
66. Trick Half Your Mind
67. Objects Ask to Be Used
68. Test Your Handedness
69. Use Your Right Brain-and Your Left, Too
Chapter 7. Reasoning
70. Use Numbers Carefully
71. Think About Frequencies Rather than Probabilities
72. Detect Cheaters
73. Fool Others into Feeling Better
74. Maintain the Status Quo
Chapter 8. Togetherness
75. Grasp the Gestalt
76. To Be Noticed, Synchronize in Time
77. See a Person in Moving Lights
78. Make Things Come Alive
79. Make Events Understandable as Cause and Effect
80. Act Without Knowing It
Chapter 9. Remembering
81. Bring Stuff to the Front of Your Mind
82. Subliminal Messages Are Weak and Simple
83. Fake Familiarity
84. Keep Your Sources Straight (if You Can)
85. Create False Memories
86. Change Context to Build Robust Memories
87. Boost Memory Using Context
88. Think Yourself Strong
89. Navigate Your Way Through Memory
90. Have an Out-of-Body Experience
91. Enter the Twilight Zone: The Hypnagogic State
92. Make the Caffeine Habit Taste Good
Chapter 10. Other People
93. Understand What Makes Faces Special
94. Signal Emotion
95. Make Yourself Happy
96. Reminisce Hot and Cold
97. Look Where I'm Looking
98. Monkey See, Monkey Do
99. Spread a Bad Mood Around
100. You Are What You Think
Index
About the Authors
Tom Stafford has been studying, researching
and teaching psychology at the university level since 1996, when he received
his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience. He's currently employed as a researcher for
the BBC and editor of The Psychologist magazine (the official journal of the
British Psychological Society), positions which bring him into contact with
working research scientists around the world.
Matt Webb's background is in new media. His
freelance activities include an IM interface to Google, which predated the Google
API and is included in O'Reilly's Google Hacks. He launched a project
to find the Web's favorite color that was featured on BBC News Online and national
newspapers in the UK. His current job in R&D at the BBC involves these kinds
of projects internally, and gives him experience at addressing abstract social
and technological ideas to mixed audiences. He was a popular speaker at O'Reilly's
Emerging Technology Conference in 2004.
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