Last Saturday as the crowds were starting to make their way to many of the various music stages at the Picnic the Futureproof team were hard at work in the Science Gallery Tent getting audience members to take ‘taste-altering pills’ and making people’s hands go numb.

The show was an investigation of the five senses and how remarkable and curious those senses are. We learned just how much are brain is involved in what we see and feel.

One of the many experiments carried was the Rubik Cube Illusion which you can see above. Believe it or not the orange square and the brown square are really the same colour. When you see the whole image your top-down expectations over-rule the information coming from your retina. Your retina detects equal levels of luminance from each of those squares but since one of them is in the shadow the brain recalibrates that info and presumes that actual brightness of the square must be greater, so you perceive it that way. It's a nice illustration of the fact that when we are perceiving things what we are really doing is making a best guess as to what is out in the environment that could be generating the pattern of light that has been detected by our retina. Our brains construct a model of the outside world and use sensory information to constantly update it. When the rest of the square are covered (see picture below) you realise it’s just a trick of the brain. 

We also investigated the experience of pain. You’ll see in the photo below producer John Fardy getting ready to have a needle stuck in his arm to better understand the phenomenology of pain!

You can hear it all this Saturday from 10am.