The Importance of Distance in Life

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Your brain does not have distance information available at all that's NYU neuroscientist cognitive scientist and psychologist Pascal Wash. Over a lifetime you learn what is associated with distance so for instance you learn that things that are far away look bluer because of scattering of light in the atmosphere. You're going to return to this quite a bit for the rest of the episode but we're not going to dig into it quite yet except to say you are not so smart as an idea as a thing. It's sort of mission statement is you are unaware of how unaware you are and because of that you are the unreliable narrator in the story of your life.

When facing a novel and uncertain situation, the brain secretly disambiguates the ambiguous without letting you know it was ever uncertain in the first place, leading people who disambiguate differently to seem iNsAnE.

This episode is about why we so often don't understand why we disagree, which leads us to disagree even more, and we explore that through the science behind The Dress. We look into why some people see it as black and blue, others see it as white and gold, and how the scientific investigation of why that is led to the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs, and how the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs may be, as one researcher explains, the nuclear bomb of cognitive neuroscience.

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