There is a specific social awkwardness that everybody has encountered from one side and nobody from both.
Visiting an unfamiliar house, you register its smell immediately — not unpleasant necessarily,…
Almost everything strange about smell follows from two facts: it is chemistry rather than physics, and it takes an unusually direct route into the brain. Here are twelve consequences.
1.…
There is a particular kind of double-take that everyone has experienced. A washing machine looks startled. A car in a car park appears smug. A pattern in wood grain resolves,…
Here is a question that has been asked for centuries and is still argued about on television panel shows: why does a mirror swap left and right but leave up…
The useful way to think about vision is not as a recording but as a reconstruction — a best guess assembled from partial data. Here are twelve of the shortcuts…