Mind Illusions

Do we know what the world looks like? The eye is made up of some of the most amazing tissue in the body. The lens, for example, is perfectly clear, perfectly curved and is capable of focusing on an incredible amount of data. But vision has only partly to do with the retina, lens, and cornea. Understanding what we see mostly happens in the brain, which is why a person with perfect vision is still susceptible to optical illusions. Do we know what the world looks like? We know approximately what it looks like, which is enough to get by, but our perception of the world is not without a certain amount of 'misreading.' Our visual nervous system approximates color, shape, and dimension. The process of seeing begins with the presence of light, an image being formed on the retina, and an impulse transmitted to the brain, but there are many other factors that play a part in how we perceive visually. Our perceptions are influenced by our past experiences, imagination, and associations.

Brain Functions

Mozart effect

The Mozart effect can refer to:

• A set of research results that indicate that listening to Mozart's music may induce a short-term improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as "spatial-temporal reasoning;"
• Popularized versions of the hypothesis, which suggest that "listening to Mozart makes you smarter", or that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development;
• A US trademark for a set of commercial recordings and related materials, which are claimed to harness the effect for a variety of purposes. The trademark owner, Don Campbell, Inc., claims benefits far beyond improving spatio-temporal reasoning or raising intelligence, defining the mark as "an inclusive term signifying the transformational powers of music in health, education, and well-being."

The term was first coined by Alfred A. Tomatis who used Mozart's music as the listening stimulus in his work attempting to cure a variety of disorders. The approach has been popularized in a book by Don Campbell, and is based on an experiment published in Nature suggesting that listening to Mozart temporarily boosted scores on one portion of the IQ test. As a result, the Governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed a budget to provide every child born in Georgia with a CD of classical music