However, it is also true that simply because I cannot distinguish the words being spoken here does not mean that other people could not. Some people are linguistically incredibly gifted and I believe that they might be much better than I am at distinguishing word segmentation, especially at recognizing the phonetic clues that signal the beginning of a new word. In the video of the McGurk Effect, I hear the man saying "ba." I continue to hear this no matter what combination of seeing and listening I apply. The illusion -- the mismatch between sound and hearing -- results from the fact that we combine visual and auditory cues in decoding speech.

Question Seven: The Aha! Moment

Surely everyone has had the experience at least once of suddenly seeing something that was not clear before. For myself, this has most often occurred in the context of math and science. Indeed, one of the archetypal "aha!" moments comes from the history of science as Archimedes is said to have leaped out of suddenly over-flowing bathtub and shouted "Eureka!" when, in an instant, he understood the connection between displacement and mass.

This same experience is repeated time and again as a student wakes up and looks at a math problem that was impossible to solve the night before, only to find it transparently easy the next day. Of course, the problem is not actually easier, nor have we become magically smarter overnight. Rather, our brain has been able to reconfigure the information that we have in a way that it makes sense. In some ways, one can compare this process to the process of decoding an encrypted message: Once we have the key, the message is clear.

Such an epiphany has occurred to many a number of times when I have made an etymological connection between a word that I am learning in one language (say, French), and another language (for example,...

For example, the word "mason" has a French cognate -- "macon" (with a cedilla). The words look different, although they sounds similar. One day I was looking at the word "macon" and all of a sudden I saw that the two words were really the same. I made a new connection between two known facts -- and that formation of the connection creates that sensation of an epiphany.
Question Eight:

The Wason Selection task requires a subject to make a logical choice to determine which of a possible set of combinations is true. The key to the task is to remember that certain conditions have to be met at the same time (that is, simultaneously) rather than sequentially or separately. This is easy to do in retrospect, but it is all-too-easy to overlook when one is actually taking the test. Because it seems like such an easy task one does not realize that one actually has to pay some attention to what is going on to make sure that one does not many an easy mistake.

Selective attention is the tendency of an individual to pay attention only to those aspects of his or her environment that accord with already established beliefs, ideas, or knowledge. This is directly related to the way in which stereotypes work and are maintained. For example, if one believes that blacks are more likely than whites to be criminals, one will remember a news story about a black bank officer who has embezzled funds and ignore the far larger number of white bank officials who commit fraud on a much greater scale.

This is also related to the concept of illusory correlation, which is the tendency for an individual to see a connection or relationship between or among a set of experiences, objects, etc. even when there is no real connection, causation, or correlation. The above example with the bank officers could also serve as an example of illusory correlation.