Physical Computing: Reaction To Visual Intelligence

Donald Hoffman's "Visual Intelligence" manages to take a relatively conventional concept (that our brain "tricks" us into perceiving much of what we deem "real"), and illustrates it through the novel venue of amputees.  By using the amputees' sensation of phantom limbs, Hoffman creates a tangible and realistic illustration of the disconnect between the physical and the mental world.

While Hoffman's examples do a great job at illustrating the concepts, the concepts themselves aren't exactly novel.  It's a well known fact of many simple schoolyard tricks that the brain can be easily tricked into misperceiving "reality".  Watching movies, smelling one thing while eating another, combining hot and cold sensations - all of these things can allow us to trick our nervous system into perceiving things that aren't "really" there.

In the end, this fact is obvious, but perhaps overlooked because it is so common:  the best thing we can do moving forward is to try and consider how we are really perceiving the world around us, and enlist this as we make choices in design.