Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

Dreaming serves to protect the brain’s visual cortex from being overtaken by other sensory inputs. The brain’s peak ...

Researchers at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology find that the hippocampus sends signals to the visual cortex to predict what we are about to see. Our brains are powerful prediction machines ...

When animals move through complex visual environments, the brain cannot afford to analyze every detail one by one. Instead, it rapidly extracts the overall structure of the scene—for example, the mean ...

Allen Institute researcher Jerome Lecoq points to one of the diagrams that was used in a study focusing on how the brain interprets optical illusions. (Allen Institute Photo / Erik Dinnel) Our brains ...

To what extent has Earth’s gravity shaped our cognitive and brain functions? Utilizing spaceflight and a ground-based analog, a new study shows that the human brain relies on bodily gravitational ...

Optical illusions aren’t just fun internet puzzles—they’re windows into how our brains construct reality. New research shows ...

Sounds can alter the way the brain interprets what it sees. This is the key finding of a new study by SISSA researchers in Trieste, published in PLOS Computational Biology. The research shows that, ...

For centuries, vision has been one of the most essential aspects of human experience, shaping how we navigate and understand the world. But what happens when vision is no longer constrained by biology ...

Daniel Kish lost both eyes to retinal cancer before he was two years old. By the time he was a teenager, he was mountain biking through traffic and hiking solo in the wilderness, navigating entirely ...