

Video: Rubber hand illusion Video: Rubber hand illusion

How does your brain work? Brain imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and similar advanced techniques have given neuroscientists huge insights into this question. Yet studying the brain doesn’t have to be such a high-tech enterprise. Simple experiments can still probe the inner workings of the brain, and many of these are easy to set up at home or are available on the internet.

Try them on yourself and you will experience first-hand some of its strangest, most amazing workings – facets of brain function that scientists are only just starting to understand. You’ll see aspects of perception, memory, attention, body image, the unconscious mind – and the curious consequences of your brain being split in two.

1 Seeing isn’t believing

TAKE a moment to observe the world around you. Scan the horizon with your eyes. Tilt your head back and listen. You’re probably getting the impression that your senses are doing a fine job of capturing everything that is going on. Yet that is all it is: an impression.

Despite the fact that your visual system seems to provide you with a continuous widescreen movie, most of the time it is only gathering information from a tiny patch of the visual field. The rest of the time it isn’t even doing that. Somehow from this sporadic input it conjures up a seamless visual experience.

What is going on? Bang in the middle of your retina is a small patch of densely crowded photoreceptors called the fovea. This is the retina’s sweet spot, the only part of the eye capable of seeing with the rich detail and full colour we …