You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [43]
Researchers believe Haast’s eagle was almost certainly the origin of the Pouakai stories.
So that would mean all the horrifying shit that flashed through your imagination a few paragraphs ago—the flapping wings, the fear urine, the entire tribes picked off one by one like slasher-flick victims—that all probably happened.
Although, after a few generations of devouring humans for fun and profit, mankind did finally have the last laugh at Haast’s eagle: We drove it to extinction simply by eating everything else around it and then not providing enough nutrition with our doughy little bodies to sustain the notoriously ravenous diet of the bird gods.
So, yeah . . . Suck it, enormous sky raptor of legend! We beat your ass by not having enough calories! Go humanity!
FIVE WAYS YOUR BRAIN IS MESSING WITH YOUR HEAD
SURE, our minds are being screwed with by advertisers, politicians, magicians, etc. But as it turns out, the ways in which your head is being truly and royally messed with the most are coming from inside your skull.
5. CHANGE BLINDNESS
Change blindness is the inability to notice changes that happen right in front of you as long as you don’t watch the actual change take place.
Um, what?
Focus on anyone around you. If their pants spontaneously changed color, you’d notice and probably soil your own. But if you looked away and focused on something else, then came back and found their jeans had turned to khakis, odds are you almost certainly would not notice, even if your attention was elsewhere for only a few seconds.
If your brain processed everything in your visual spectrum you would go insane, so instead it picks and chooses what to focus on. If an image changes while your brain isn’t paying attention, your brain tells you the change was there all along.
It’s like your brain is sitting in class, staring out the window at a cloud that sort of looks like a penis. When you call on your brain, it does the same thing you do when a teacher calls on you in those circumstances: starts bullshitting.
Where it gets really weird . . .
Working with psychologist Susan Greenfield, the BBC decided to take this idea to a ridiculous extreme. They filmed an experiment in which one man worked the counter at a university copy center while another hid below the counter. When a student walked up and requested a form, the first man would duck down behind the counter to get it, and the previously hidden man would pop up and say, “Ah, here it is.” Despite this previously hidden second person looking completely different, most of the students did not freaking notice that they were now talking to a totally different person.
This is probably what made the producers of Bewitched think they could just switch Darrins on us.
4. SACCADIC MASKING
Saccadic masking is the forty or so minutes per day that you’re effectively blind.
Um, what?
Look at the wall to your left. When you flicked your eyes over there, for just a moment you were blind. And you didn’t even know it.
Ever watch a movie that gave you motion sickness due to the camera whipping around too fast with that “shaky handheld camera” gimmick? Your brain doesn’t like those rapid changes in vision, which is why some folks ended up puking while watching Cloverfield.
Your eye movements are even faster and shakier than that. If you were to look closely at someone else’s eye, you’d notice that it’s never steady for more than a third of a second. Even when you think you’re rolling your eyes, they’re actually moving in a series of rapid jerky movements known as saccades. To prevent your world from looking like you’re seeing it through a jerky camcorder all day, your brain shuts down your optic nerve during these tiny movements. That’s why we told you