What if during the World Cup finals, a unicorn pranced out onto the field. Or a woman on stilts appeared. Or, say, Wilford Brimley. You'd probably notice, right? Not necessarily, as psychologist Daniel Simons has shown.
Sue Hespos of Northwestern's Infant Cognition Lab told me a great story that didn't make it into the first Clever Apes show: Audio Meanwhile, if you want to know more about optical brain imaging, also called near-infrared spectroscopy or NIRS, here's a paper from Hespos on it.
The apes are us -- the latest version of a critter that has evolved to be curious. This thirst of ours seems to be hard-wired -- to know ourselves, to find truth and to seek beauty in the universe.
The Project on Child Development at Northwestern University uses this eye tracker contraption to measure minute movements of a baby's eyes -- or in this case, mine. Those red dots tell you what I'm looking at "¦ and that's my mug there in the lower-right corner.
