What you are not seeing

The order, and why it is this one

Join anywhere. Each stop carries the route with it, so the foot of every question here offers the next one and the way back to this page.

1. 01How much of what you see is invented?Vision is not a camera. Some of what reaches your awareness is filled in rather than measured from light, and the filling-in is invisible from the inside. How much of it is prediction is still argued.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
2. 02Why do we miss what is in front of us?Noticing depends on attention, and attention is a limited resource allocated in advance. What falls outside it can go unreported entirely, even when people are asked about it directly. Whether it also went unseen, or was seen faintly and never reported, is still argued.Surfacedepth, meaning: Things we understand reasonably well.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
3. 03Does the language you speak change what you see?The strong claim that language determines thought is not supported. A narrower one has been reported: the categories a language marks speed up the discriminations that cross them, and the effect shrinks or disappears when the language system is loaded during the task. The Russian blues demonstration did not reappear when another group repeated it.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
4. 04Can you trust a memory?Memory is partly a reconstruction rather than a replay, which means it can be edited by what happens after the event, including by the questions asked about it. Under persistent suggestion a minority of people come to remember whole events that never happened, some of them serious. Estimates of how large a minority run from about 15 per cent to about 30, depending on what is counted as remembering.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
5. 05Do we choose what we do?Brain activity can be measured before a person reports deciding to move, and can predict the choice a little better than chance. What that shows depends on what the activity is, and the classical interpretation has a serious alternative that is hard to rule out.Abyssdepth, meaning: Fundamental questions where our understanding is extremely limited.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read