THE BRAIN CREATES SHORTCUTS

You r b rain creates these shortcuts in order to quickly make se nse out of t he world
around you. You r b rain receives millions of senso ry inputs every second (the estimate is
40 million) and it's trying to make se nse of all of t hat inp ut. It uses rules of thumb, based
on past exp erience, to make guesses abo ut w hat you see. Most of the time that wo rks,
but sometimes it causes errors.

1\

FIGURE 1.1 You see triang les, but they are FI GURE 1.2 An example of a Kanizsa recta ng le
not really there
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Optical illusions are examples of how the brain misinterprets what the eyes see. For
example, in Figure 1.4 the li ne on the left looks longer than the line on the rig ht, but
they're actually the same length. Named for Franz MOIIer-Lyer, who created it in 1889,
this is one of the oldest optical illusions.

FIGURE 1.4 These lines are

actually the same length
 • .
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r.::-,5

3 4

5
5

3 3

FIGURE 3.2 Some samp les o f Biederman's g eons

THE YERKES-DODSON LAW
Research on st ress shows that a little stress (called arousal in the field of psychology)
ca n help you perform a task, b ecause it heightens aware ness. Too much stress, how-
ever, degrades p erformance. Two psycholog ist s, Ro bert Yerkes and John Dodson,
(1908) first postulated t his arousal/performance relationsh ip, and hence it has been
calle d the Yerkes-Dodson law for ove r a century (Figure 86.2).

Performance Complex
task

Arousal (Stress)
FIGURE 86.2 The Yerkes-Dodson law