I'm sensing something odd here

This is pretty strange stuff.

Physorg.com:

Harnessing Our Sensory Superpowers

March 12, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research in perceptual psychology and brain science is revealing that our senses pick up information about the world that we thought was only available to other species, Lawrence Rosenblum, UCR professor of psychology, writes in a new book.

Blind mountain bikers use echolocation to hear rocks in the trail. A connoisseur sniffs out the world’s most expensive cup of coffee. An artist whose sight disappeared as a young man paints and chooses his colors by touch.

New research in perceptual psychology and brain science is revealing that our senses pick up information about the world that we thought was only available to other species, Lawrence Rosenblum, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, writes in a new book, “See What I’m Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses” (Norton, 2010), published this month.

“We have hidden sensory channels we’re using all the time. This enables us to perceive things, often without awareness of where we get the information,” Rosenblum says. His 350-page book is aimed at getting people interested in new research on the senses. He uses numerous examples of people who have strengthened sight, hearing, smell, taste or touch - such as blind baseball players and a sommelier who can taste the vintage of a fine wine - to explain how the brain uses multiple senses and the subtlest information to perceive the world, and suggests ways to further develop those senses.

Brain-imaging and other tools have enabled researchers in the last decade to discover that the human brain is capable of changing its structure and organization - a process called neuroplasticity - as it is influenced by experience.

“It turns out that vacant areas of the brain are co-opted, and this can happen if you’re blindfolded for only 90 minutes,” he says. Removing sight as a sensory power can quickly enhance the senses of hearing, and even smell, for example.

Still, even without sensory loss, we already accomplish many of these exotic sensory skills. “We all have an onboard sonar system and a type of absolute pitch; and we all can perceive speech from seeing and even touching faces,” Rosenblum writes in “See What I’m Saying.” “What’s more, we engage many of these skills all day long. What largely distinguishes the expert perceiver from the rest of us is the same thing that gets us from here to Carnegie Hall: practice.”

Rosenblum has spent two decades studying multisensory perception, lipreading and hearing. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He is internationally known for his research on risks the inaudibility of hybrid cars pose for blind and other pedestrians.

More information: http://www.psychology.ucr.edu/faculty/rosenblum/index.html

Provided by University of California, Riverside

Here's an older study from the same guy. Fascinating stuff:

Lip-read me now, hear me better later

April 12, 2007

Experience hearing a person's voice allows us to more easily hear what they are saying. Now research by UC Riverside psychology Professor Lawrence D. Rosenblum and graduate students Rachel M. Miller and Kauyumari Sanchez has shown that experience seeing a person's face also makes it easier to hear them.

Rosenblum’s paper, “Lip-Read Me Now, Hear Me Better Later: Crossmodal Transfer of Talker Familiarity Effects,” will appear in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science.

Sixty college undergraduates were asked to lip-read sentences from a silent videotape of a talker's face. These subjects all had normal hearing and vision and had no formal lip reading experience.

After an hour of lip reading, the students were asked to listen to sentences heard against a background of noise and to identify as many words as they could. Half of the students heard sentences from the same talker they had just lip-read, while the other half heard sentences by a new talker. The undergraduates who lip-read and heard speech from the same talker were better at identifying the noisy sentences than those who lip-read from one talker and heard speech from another.

These findings suggest that when we watch a person speak, we become familiar with characteristics of their speaking style which also are present in the sound of their speech. This allows talker familiarity to be transferred from lip reading to listening, thereby making a talker easier to hear. These results have implications for individuals with hearing impairments as well as for brain lesion patients, Rosenblum said.

Source: Association for Psychological Science

Choice Blindness (and Choice Blindness Blindness..!)

I've got a bookmark folder of "blog-able items." I haven't looked in it in years. Here's one of those "items" from 2005.

from LiveScience.com:

Health

Duped and Clueless: How Easily We Fool Ourselves

By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 06 October 2005 02:01 pm ET

Researchers show volunteers a pair of female faces and

ask them to choose which one they think is more attractive.

credit: Mark Hanlon

Do you always get what you ask for? A new study finds that when you don't, you might not even notice the difference.

Swedish researchers showed a pair of female faces to 120 volunteers for 2 seconds and then asked them to choose which one they thought was more attractive. The researchers then asked the volunteers to explain their choice.

The trial was repeated 15 times for each volunteer, using different pairs of faces. but in three of the trials the faces were secretly switched after a decision had been made.

Surprisingly, not only were a large number of the volunteers oblivious to the switch when ultimately allowed to take a longer look at their choice, they were actually able to gave detailed explanations for why they preferred the face that, indeed, they had actually rejected.

It would be asking for an apple and then explaining exactly why you wanted the banana you got instead.

'She's radiant'

The researchers call the phenomenon "choice blindness."

"She's radiant," gushed one male volunteer about a face he didn't choose. "I would rather have approached her at a bar than the other one. I like earrings!"

Another female volunteer said that the face she chose (which in fact she hadn't) looked nicer than the other.

Lars Hall, a researcher from Lund University, thinks the volunteers were sincere when giving their reports and somehow failed to notice the switch.

"'Confabulation' is perhaps a safe term to use," Hall said in an email interview. "That is, the [false] reports were constructed after the fact.'"

After the experiment, the volunteers were presented with a "hypothetical" scenario: Suppose they were involved in an experiment where the faces you chose were switched. Would they notice?

Doubly blind

Eighty-four percent of the volunteers said they would. The researchers called this "choice blindness blindness." When the volunteers were told the truth about how they had been duped, many expressed surprise and even disbelief.

The researchers don't yet know how or why choice blindness occurs, but they think it gets to the very heart of how we make decisions. Some of the most popular theories about decision-making assume that people will notice when their choices and the outcomes of those choices don't line up.

"But as our experiment shows, this is not always the case," Hall told LiveScience. "Therefore the concept of 'intention' needs to be reevaluated and scrutinized more closely."

Choice blindness experiments may also provide a way to study subjectivity and introspection, topics once considered by many scientists to be extremely difficult or even impossible to evaluate scientifically.

"If someone insists on knowing their own mind, it is very difficult to progress beyond this point," Hall said. "[But] by using choice blindness we can create a very particular—and very strange—situation in which we actually can say that someone is wrong despite the fact that they might vehemently claim to know their own mind."

The study is detailed in the Oct. 7 issue of the journal Science.