Your Brain's Blind Spots

Science and Technology · 10 questions

Can you spot the tricks your own eyes and mind keep playing on you.

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1. What is the name of the spot on the retina where no image forms at all?

   1. The fovea
   2. The blind spot
   3. The iris
   4. The cornea
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   B) The blind spot

2. When the first number you hear drags all your later estimates toward it, that is called what?

   1. Anchoring
   2. The halo effect
   3. The placebo effect
   4. The Barnum effect
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   A) Anchoring

3. Seeking out only the evidence that supports what you already believe is known as what?

   1. Cognitive dissonance
   2. Overgeneralisation
   3. Confirmation bias
   4. Projection
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   C) Confirmation bias

4. Seeing faces in clouds and power sockets is an example of which perceptual tendency?

   1. Synaesthesia
   2. Aphasia
   3. Agnosia
   4. Pareidolia
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   D) Pareidolia

5. Which effect describes novices overrating their skill while experts underrate theirs?

   1. The Zeigarnik effect
   2. The Mandela effect
   3. The Hawthorne effect
   4. The Dunning-Kruger effect
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   D) The Dunning-Kruger effect

6. When one good trait makes us judge everything else about a person favourably, that is what?

   1. Framing
   2. Anchoring
   3. The halo effect
   4. The recency effect
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   C) The halo effect

7. Feeling you 'knew it all along' after learning an outcome is called what?

   1. Choice blindness
   2. Hindsight bias
   3. Loss aversion
   4. The framing effect
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   B) Hindsight bias

8. Our eyes constantly jitter, but the brain suppresses the motion so the world looks still.

   1. True
   2. False
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   A) True

9. Unfinished tasks tend to stay in memory more insistently than completed ones.

   1. True
   2. False
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   A) True

10. Humans normally use only about ten percent of their brains.

    1. True
    2. False
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    B) False