ILLUSION REAL PLAY PROBLEM DRIVERS

Scientists in Japan suggest that patterns of stripes on walls near roads might help counteract this illusion, helping smooth traffic flow, says researcher Akiyasu Tomoeda at Musashino University in Tokyo.

ILLUSION REAL PLAY PROBLEM DRIVERS

This means that at sags drivers often fail to realize they are going uphill and hence drive without accelerating to maintain speed, causing traffic slowdowns and jams. T he visual illusion of a vertical gradient tends to lead drivers to misjudge a roadвЂ™s slope. Indeed, researchers Steffen Kallbekken and HГҐkon SГ¦len found that Scandinavia's largest hotel chain reduced food waste by 20 percent by reducing plate size as well as by posting signs encouraging customers to help themselves to buffets of food more than once per meal in order to nudge them to not overload their plates on the first visit to the steam table.Дips in the road, where the pavement shifts from downhill to uphill, often lead to traffic jams. The Small Plate Movement now aims to get families and restaurants to use smaller dinnerware. This finding suggests that using smaller plates might be one simple step to trim waistlines and waste less food. has increased 22 percent since 1960, perhaps helping to explain why people now eat more per sitting. The scientists also noted that the average size of a dinner dish in the U.S. Similarly, in 2006 researchers Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum found that larger plates can make the same amount of food appear smaller and vice versa. The more empty space around the inner circle, the smaller it appears. Scientists have long known the Delboeuf illusion can make people misjudge the size of identical circles surrounded by larger circles. The invention is patent pending, and Macknik has received a National Science Foundation grant to research the physiological underpinnings of this illusion in the brain. The savings might be dramatic-roughly a quarter of all electric power is used for lighting, according to the U.S. Macknik suggests this discovery could lead to lights that save energy and last longer. Their findings suggest that if 67-millisecond pulses of light were alternated with 10-millisecond periods of darkness, people would nonetheless perceive these light pulses as one and not as flickering. Macknik and his colleagues discovered that perceptions of brightness were not only linked with the duration of light flashes, but also with their periodicity. For instance, Thomas Edison found that bulbs flickering 60 times a second appear to be constant light sources, says Macknik (who also serves on Scientific American MINDвЂ™s board of advisers). Researchers have analyzed the flickering of lightbulbs for as long as they have existed. By creating a lightbulb that exploits this illusion, the researchers hope to create bulbs that save up to 20 percent on electricity bills. In 2012 cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Macknik, now at the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, and his colleagues discovered an illusion that allows a light to essentially flicker off for 13 percent of the time yet appear as bright to the human brain as if it was on the entire time. 'You can reduce the amount of information in a signal and the brain fills in the gaps.'ДЄfter removing sounds that people cannot generally hear and then using traditional compression methods that encode redundant information to save space, MP3s can reduce the size of a sound file by 90 percent or so.

'Lossy audio compression absolutely involves an illusion,' says perceptual and cognitive psychologist Diana Deutsch at the University of California, San Diego. For example, if two sounds are presented simultaneously very close together in time, then depending on their frequency and intensity, the brain may only perceive one of them, a phenomenon known as masking. How does MP3 compression work? It eliminates generally inaudible sounds.

An MP3 is a product of вЂњ lossy audio compression,вЂќ in which parts of the audio signal are discarded to shrink a sound file yet cause zero to minimal perceived loss in the sound quality for the average listener. Here are 10 practical applications that use or control illusions, from warships to virtual reality to Michelangelo's David and the Statue of Liberty.ДЄll MP3s are based on illusion. Although illusions are by definition not real, scientists are increasingly finding ways to use them to make an impact on the real world.

Illusion real play problem