The laboratory
46 experiments to try on yourself
One to four minutes each. Try one, discover what it reveals about you, challenge someone. And if you like it, live through the episode it comes from.
Your eyes
Optical illusions and vision
The blind spot test
Make a black dot disappear inside your own eye.The disappearing dots
Three yellow dots vanish before your eyes.The gray strawberries
Red strawberries. No red pixels.The phantom flag
Stare for twenty seconds, then see colors that don’t exist.The upside-down Mona Lisa
Nothing unusual. Now turn it over.The Mona Lisa’s smile
She smiles when you’re not looking at her.Find the different shade
One square isn’t like the others.
Your memory and your attention
False memories, attention, the champions’ methods
Count the bounces
Count carefully. Don’t miss a thing.The false memory test
Remember a list of words. An intruder is waiting.The accident witness
One word is enough to rewrite a memory.The memory palace
The memory champions’ technique.The Stroop test
Name the color of the ink. Not the word.Mirror drawing
Trace a star. Up and down are reversed.
Your decisions
Cognitive biases and paradoxes
The Monty Hall problem
Three doors. Should you change your mind?The wheel that steers your guesses
A random number is about to steer your answer.Would you defend an opinion that isn’t yours?
Your opinions are about to be reversed. Will you notice?Your favorite rectangle
Is the most beautiful rectangle the golden one?
Your ears
Music, sounds and auditory illusions
The scale that rises forever
It rises. And rises. It never stops.Why does music sound sad?
One note changes. The mood flips.The four chords of pop
Four chords. Hundreds of hits.Hear Auto-Tune
Correct an off-key voice. Push it all the way to robot.The kick drum that changed music
The boom that shaped hip-hop.The sound of two black holes merging
A chirp that set out 1.3 billion years ago.
Film and stories
Editing, suspense and storytelling
The Kuleshov effect
The same face. Three emotions.Surprise or suspense: Hitchcock’s bomb
You know there’s a bomb. They don’t.The Vertigo effect
The background stretches. Vertigo takes hold.One film, three scores
Change the music. Change the story.The triangles that tell a story
Three shapes. You’ll see a villain.The shape of stories
Every story draws a curve.Does the horse fly?
Find the moment when the horse flies.How many frames does it take to see motion?
Speed it up until you see the horse run.
Other people
Conformity, cooperation and language
The Asch experiment
The whole group is wrong. What about you?The prisoner’s dilemma
Cooperate or defect?Axelrod’s tournament
The cheaters win. At first.The ultimatum game
$1 or nothing. What do you choose?Bouba or kiki?
Which one is called “kiki”?Find the man who refused
Hundreds of raised arms. Only one man refuses.
Time and infinity
Time, infinities, light and the cosmos
Count ten seconds
Is your inner clock on time?The stopped clock
The first second lasts longer.The twin paradox
Ten years of travel. A century on Earth.The cosmic calendar
All of human history fits into twelve seconds.Hilbert’s hotel
No vacancy. And yet there is room.Cantor’s diagonal
Make a number that no list contains.Young’s slits, one photon at a time
A grain of light goes through two slits at once.Find Earth
3.7 billion miles. Less than a pixel.The sizes of the universe
From atoms to galaxies, one factor of ten at a time.