Chapter 1 Visual Queries

When we are awake, with our eyes open, we have the impression that we see the world vividly, completely, and in detail. But this impression is dead wrong. As scientists have devised increasingly elaborate tests to find out what is stored in the brain about the state of the visual world at any instant, the same answer has come back again and again—at any given instant, we apprehend only a tiny amount of the information in our surroundings, but it is usually just the right information to carry us through the task of the moment.

We cannot even remember new faces unless we are specifically paying attention. Consider the following remarkable “real world” experiment carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin. ...

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