Tag: quick

Stopped Clock Illusion

By Anupum Pant

When you quickly move your eyes to focus on the seconds hand of an analogue clock, have you ever noticed that the first second you see actually seems to linger for a slightly longer time? Yes, it does. And there’s a reason why it happens.

When you rapidly move eyeballs to focus from one point to the another, it’s called a Saccade. If you ever try doing this rapid movement with a camera, a motion blur occurs in between the first point focus and the last point focus.

Unlike cameras our eyes (work closely with the brain) has a built-in mechanism to erase this motion blur. The brain erases all the motion blur during those few milliseconds and replaces the motion blur frames with the final image in the end.

This is why you see the longer first second when you quickly focus your eyes on the seconds hand – the stopped clock illusion or chronostasis. This also explains why you can never see your eyeballs moving when you try to spot their movement while staring at your own eyes on a mirror.

Michael Stevens from Vsauce explains…

A Fun Way to Multiply Numbers

By Anupum Pant

Please note, in the heading I said, a fun way to multiply numbers, not necessarily a quick way. Widely touted as an “amazingly quick Japanese method to multiply”, I think firstly, it really is not a very quick method. Secondly, I couldn’t find any sources confirming that it is a method developed by the Japanese. In fact, I’m not even sure if there’s anything Japanese about it. Nevertheless, the method sure is fun and should work great for people who don’t remember the multiplication tables well.

Another great thing about it is that it is a multiplication problem turned into a visual counting  problem. Since multiplication exercises don’t really make kids happy, they’d definitely love to count intersections instead (multiplication disguised intelligently).

Of course the counting can be used for single digit numbers too, but that won’t be too useful. For slightly more complex problems involving 2 digits like 32 X 42, it could be a life saver. It’s a fairly simple 3-step process. Here’s how you do 32 X 42 with it…

Step 1Step 1: The best way to go about it is by starting from the top left. First, you draw the 3 lines for the 3 of the number 32. And then you make 2 lines for the number 2, as shown.

Step 2

Step 2: Next make 4 lines and 2 lines intersecting the previously made lines as shown. Clearly, 4 lines for the 4 of 42 and 2 lines for the units place of 42.Step 3

 Step 3: Count the number of intersections in the far left (a), centre (b), and the far right (c). (a), (b) and (c) are 12, 14 and 4 respectively, for this problem.

The 1 from 14 gets carried to the number just at the right of it – 12 of (a), and (a) becomes 13. A similar carrying of the ten’s place to the immediate right column happens if there are any 2 digit numbers. So you are left with 13, 4 and 4 now. 1344 is the answer to 32 X 42.

This can be done for 3 digits too and more…
If there’s a zero, you could make a line and not count any intersections with it. As it has been shown in the video below…

Please hit like if you learnt something from this article.

A 5 Second Test To Know If Your Friend is a Liar

By Anupum Pant

Here is the test

Give your friend 5 seconds and ask him to draw a Q on his own forehead. Note the direction of the Q’s tail. The kind of Q he draws, will determine if he is a good or a bad liar.  For results, read on. Or watch the following video. [Video]

Self-Awareness test

According to a Psychology paper published by Hass, R. G. in the year 1984, a simple 5-second test can determine, with a good accuracy, if the person you are meeting is a good liar or a bad liar. In other words, it can determine if someone you meet, bears an ability to evade detection while lying or is more likely to get caught.

Extroverts: This liar test is based on a hypothesis that if a person is well aware of how other people see him, or in other words, is a social-situation-ninja, then the person is more likely to be able to evade detection while lying. This comes naturally to extroverts who are well aware of how others see them – which enables them to escape detection by exploiting this knowledge of other people’s perspective.

Introverts, however, aren’t very good at lying because they are self-focused, having less information on how a person they are dealing with sees them. So, when they lie, they normally get caught.

So, to catch a liar you could use a test designed to tell you, if a person’s actions are based on how others see them, or are based on how they see things. This is exactly what the Q test does.

Good liar: Some one who draws the letter Q in a way that would look right to a person looking at them, can be said to be well aware of how others see them. As a result, they can be labeled good liars (not always).

Bad Liar: If they draw it in a way that looks like a Q to them, and looks like an inverted Q to someone looking at them, then you can say that they are not well aware of how people look at them.

It is common sense that this test only works when the person you testing this on, doesn’t know about the test. Also, it isn’t a 100% accurate test.

At first, not knowing about the test, I tried it on me. I turned out to be an introvert and a bad liar – Quite accurate, I must say.

Valporate – Performance Enhancing Drug for Perfect Pitch

By Anupum Pant

Today we find out if it would be a good idea to impress your friends during the next gathering by hacking your brain with pills to learn a rare ability fairly quickly. But first, pay attention to the following jargon.

Perfect pitch

Perfect pitch is an exceptional ability among few gifted humans that enables them to recognize and re-create the pitch of a musical note instantly without the help of any external reference. There have been no cases of adults learning this ability by practice. However, pseudo absolute pitch can be learnt with great practice and only retained through regular use.

Brain plasticity

Learning to recognize musical notes, or any other ability for that matter can be reasonably easy at an early age due to a brain’s plastic state. The brain’s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience is far better at younger ages. As people age, they lose the ability to learn like kids.

For instance, picture the rate at which infants learn language. By the time they turn 2 – 4 years old, they start using thousands of words. Try learning a new language at the age of 35. It is tough.

However, a new research suggests that this state of brain can be recovered by using drugs. One such drug, according to Dr. Takao Hensch is Valporate.

Is Valporate a Performance Enhancing Drug?

No! it is not a performance enhancing drug. Valporate or Valporic acid is a drug sold under the common names – Depakote, Depacon and Stavzor. For several years it has been used to treat various disorders from migraines to bipolar disorder. It is a chemical substance that can cross the blood–brain barrier. As a result, it has the power to affect an individual’s perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, and behavior.

Dr. Takao Hensch, a Harvard University professor, recently published a study which tested the effects of Valporate on 23 healthy male subjects for two weeks. None of them had a musical experience. During this period they were trained in music. At the end of this study, researchers found that these 23 men did remarkably better than an average adult would do, at perfect pitch tests.

In the future

He thinks, may be 10 years down the line, this drug could be used to enhance other learning abilities like language learning among adults, by changing the state of their brains.

Presently, studies on how the brain changes at cellular level when this drug is taken are underway. Also, Dr. Hensch thinks that humans have evolved to experience these learning stages for a reason. If it is okay to mess around with it, is still being studied. At this stage, trying this out at home can be extremely risky. It would be wise for us to wait for scientists to come out with a comprehensive study on the effects of this drug.

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