Brain Glitches Activity

Invisiblock

This activity demonstrates ways in which your brain alters your senses and thoughts without you noticing.

Part 1: Caputo Effect

Also called the “stranger in the mirror”, the effect isn’t noticeable at first, but after a few moments, you start to notice changes.

Steps

1. Stand in front of a mirror.
2. Dim the lights.
3. Stare at yourself in the eyes for 5 minutes.
4. Be aware of what happens.

What did you see? Why does this happen?

Part 2: Mental Side Game

Your brain estimates things when your focus shifts. When you focus on something, all your senses are directed at it. When you shift away, your brain loses track of it, but it keeps a blurry placeholder. Only when your focus returns does the placeholder become sharper once again. You can try these yourself right now.

Peripheral Vision

• Look straight ahead.
• Use your side vision to look at something. Don’t shift your eyes to it directly!
• Notice how unclear and blurry it is.
• Now, shift your eyes fully to that object, and notice how clear it becomes.

Fading Senses

• Put on a piece of jewelry, touch your chin, listen to music, or wear a fragrance.
• You will immediately notice the weight of the jewelry, the sounds of your music, or the smell of your fragrance. However, over time, your focus will shift away, and the presence of those things will slip under your attention.

Cognitive Shifts

• What about your thoughts? If you don’t keep tabs on your mental habits, negative behavior loops run uninterrupted in your “mental side game”. They spiral out of control, and by the time you return your focus to them, they appear massive and overwhelming.

Explanation

Short-term Adaptation

Troxler Fading

In Part One, your brain gets bored looking at the same unchanging image in the dark, so it stops processing it. When it tries to fill the blank spaces back in, it glitches and creates a “stranger” out of the shadows, distortions to your vision because it’s trying to replace what it filtered out.

Long-term Brain Adaptation

Incremental Habituation

In a similar way to short-term adaptation, you don’t notice yourself aging. It’s called incremental habituation, and it is where you get used to small changes over time. Perhaps you’ve heard of pareidolia, where you notice familiar shapes, patterns, or human faces in objects. Your brain is really good at noticing patterns because it’s an ancient survival skill, and it responds best to sudden, apparent change. Even though you look at yourself in a mirror each day, your brain adapts to the miniscule changes. They occur slowly over time, but if you see your friend’s baby again after four years apart, those changes become instantly obvious because of the drastic, sudden mismatch with your memory’s “blurry” image of how the baby used to look.

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Conclusion

As you can see, the more aware you are about your state, the more information you have to understand how to solve your problems yourself. If you constantly look at the state of your life, you are doing a critical analysis that leads to peace through facing emotions you avoid.

Self-monitoring, Self-correcting

Self-monitor, Self-correct

Self-monitoring is where you keep tabs on yourself in all forms, such as mentally and physically. You check to see where your peripheral senses are missing something important. Shift your focus to the problems that have grown too big in the absence of your attention.

Then self-correct by facing those problems down. You don’t have to do it without help, but you must be the one to monitor yourself.

Link to original

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See Also

• Objectivity
• Perspective
• Self-aware
• OOO Effect
• Metacognitive Awareness