5 Surprising Ways Your Senses Are Lying To You

5

Your Eyes See Barely Anything At Any One Time

Your eyes feel about as big as they need to be, letting you see mountains, oceans, or your entire mom all at once. Except you're not really seeing much of any of those. The light-sensitive cells in your eyes are mostly concentrated in a section called the fovea, and as we've mentioned before, the fovea is super tiny. Imagine a one-degree-wide cone opening outward from your eye. Everything you see in detail fits in that narrow cone. As proof, keep your eyes totally still and try reading this entire page. You can't. Everything beyond "You can't" is just a blur.

It's just as well that most of your light-sensitive cells (called "cones," not to be confused with the imaginary vision cone from the last paragraph) are all dedicated to the exact thing you're concentrating on, because you don't have many to spare. You have about 6 million cones total, and since each is sensitive to just one primary color, that's the equivalent of about 2 million pixels, or the same as a 1080p image.

A 4K image, by comparison, has 8 million pixels. "Wait," you ask, "then how can I even see 4K?" Answer: You can't. A 4K movie looks good because the tiny section of it you're focusing on at any moment looks awesome, and you don't see the rest in detail. If every bit of the image other than those few centimeters were at a much lower resolution, you wouldn't even notice.

4

Your Taste Buds Sense Almost Nothing

Taste buds are pretty good at detecting whether something you put in your mouth is poison or not, but that's about it. When it comes to distinguishing flavors, smell plays a big part, as you probably know. But it's shocking just how bad your tongue is at its job. Chop up some cubes of apples and onions, pinch your nose totally shut, close your eyes, and pop some into your mouth. You won't be able to tell the two apart. Please try it. It'll be super funny ... um, I mean, scientific.

3

Stuff Can Smell Good Or Bad Depending On How Much There Is

Your nose generally tells you surprisingly little about the thing you're smelling. It just lets you recognize it as "It's that thing I smelled that other time! I probably shouldn't eat it!" It's all about association rather than information. You might assume that every human is born salivating as soon as they smell garlic, but determined scientists have tried plying babies with all kinds of smells, from rancid cheese to banana to foul onion to licorice, and were unable to get any instinctive response beyond avoidance of all new things. You aren't even born liking the smell of breast milk.

There are a few exceptions where we instinctively absolutely hate certain smells -- like cadaverine and putrescine, which are related to rotting and corpses. But it's when we try to identify and measure these aversions that things get really weird. Take, say, poop. It smells how it does largely because of an organic compound called indole. And yet some flowers, like jasmine and orange blossoms, also produce indole. When perfumes want to smell like flowers, they almost always include some indole. And this makes them smell good, even though they technically smell like shit.

That's not the only chemical that confuses the nose like that. P-cresol is another compound that forms in the large intestine. It's what makes farm animals smell bad, and scientists have set up experiments detecting the concentrations of p-cresol downwind of farms to try to measure how odors spread. But the compound is also added to perfumes. In this case, it only smells bad at low concentrations, such as when it's dispersed through the air and goes into your open car window when you're driving by that herd of cows. But when super concentrated, p-cresol smells medicine-y, like Lysol.

2

When Two Fingers Feel Something, Your Brain Can Get The Wrong Idea

Here's an experiment with very little practical application, other than making you feel like you should get a refund from your body's manufacturer. First, get three identical coins. If you have no coins handy, go outside and loudly demand change from passersby. Then put two of the three coins in the freezer for about half an hour. Leave the third on a table.

Now take the cold coins out and lay them on either side of the third. Touch your pointer finger to the top of one of the cold coins and your ring finger to the other. Now touch the middle coin with your middle finger. It feels cold too, even though it isn't. And it's not that your fingers just feel cold all over; your middle finger doesn't feel cold until it makes contact with the third coin, and your brain gets all those signals and figures that third coin has to be cold too, because that's the only thing that makes sense.

Your fingers are very sensitive to touch (as can be tested, very easily, by firing lasers at them, or by seeing how much more painful it is to slam your fingers in a door than to slam your whole arm), which has been pretty useful when we've had to learn to use tools and write and stuff. It's just that fingers aren't always so great at working individually and figuring things out correctly.

1

Your Imagination Fills In Gaps In What Your Ears Pick Up

Your ears hear stuff all the time, but it's up to your brain to string it all together into some kind of actual information. Which is a good thing, because there's so much useless sound out there. Try turning on the sound recorder on your phone during the day and tape a conversation. Listening to your recordings later on, you'll hear a whole lot of traffic and machinery drowning out voices and be amazed that you were able to talk to anyone at all without you both having to shout over the entire world.

But even if sound vanishes at points, your brain fills in the blanks and lets you understand it through a process called phonemic restoration. This video shows what's going on: