New Textbook on Cognitive Science

[drcy]

Attention is a major part of human thinking. There is too much sensory and other information for the brain to process, so humans both consciously and automatically focus on just some. In many cases, we have to suppress information to do things (Cover our ears to noise to comprehend difficult text). Though this very focus influences of perception of things.

Optical illusions and similar tricks ('is it a vase or two faces') are fun, but also very informative because they show the margins of error in our perceptions and inner workings of our brains. Our brains make automatic educated guesses and are far from omniscient, sometimes comically getting things wrong. As I say in the book, 'Visual illusions demonstrate that reality and human perception of reality are different things."