Your experience is subjective in a way that you don't realize. Here's proof.

3 a : characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind : "phenomenal" — compare "objective" 1b b : relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states
4 a (1) : peculiar to a particular individual : personal (2) : modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background b : arising from conditions within the brain or sense organs and not directly caused by external stimuli c : arising out of or identified by means of one's perception of one's own states and processes — compare "objective" 1c

3 a : expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations ive art>

arising from conditions within the brain or sense organs and not directly caused by external stimuli

It turns out that the way we perceive others can also influence our own sense of touch. In a new study published in the open access journal PLoS One, researchers from the University of Bologna report that looking at photos of faces being touched strongly enhances the perception of touch on the observer's face when the photos are of people who belong the same ethnic or political group.

Social interactions are influenced by the perception of others as similar or dissimilar to the self. Such judgements could depend on physical and semantic characteristics, such as membership in an ethnic or political group. In the present study we tested whether social representations of the self and of others could affect the perception of touch. To this aim, we assessed tactile perception on the face when subjects observed a face being touched by fingers. In different conditions we manipulated the identity of the shown face. In a first experiment, Caucasian and Maghrebian participants viewed a face belonging either to their own or to a different ethnic group; in a second experiment, Liberal and Conservative politically active participants viewed faces of politicians belonging to their own or to the opposite political party. The results showed that viewing a touched face most strongly enhanced the perception of touch on the observer's face when the observed face belonged to his/her own ethnic or political group.

A new study published in Current Biology now shows that visual distortions of the body image in patients suffering from chronic pain can significantly affect their perception of painful sensations. The findings could lead to improvements in the treatment of, and rehabilitation regimes for, a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Visual distortion of a limb modulates the pain and swelling evoked by movement
Current Biology, Volume 18, Issue 22, Pages R1047-R1048
G. Moseley, T. Parsons, C. Spence

For their study, Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya, of Goldsmiths College in London and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, respectively, performed two separate experiments. In the first, 30 participants were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts, each lasting 15 seconds. After each piece of music, the participants were shown a photograph of a face, expressing either a happy, sad, or neutral expression. The photographs were flashed on a screen for 1 second, after which the participants were asked to rate the emotion on a 7-piont scale, where 1 denotes extremely sad and 7 extremely happy.
Thus, the visual emotional stimuli - the photos of faces - were "primed" by an emotional state conveyed by a piece of music. All the participants correctly identified the emotions expressed by the faces in the photographs presented to them. However, happy faces primed by a happy piece of music were rated as happier than when primed by sad music. Conversely, sad faces primed by a piece of sad music were rated as sadder than those primed with a happy piece of music. Finally, neutral faces were rated higher when primed by a happy piece of music and lower when primed by a sad piece.

Music is one of the most powerful elicitors of subjective emotion, yet it is not clear whether emotions elicited by music are similar to emotions elicited by visual stimuli. This leads to an open question: can music-elicited emotion be transferred to and/or influence subsequent vision-elicited emotional processing? Here we addressed this question by investigating processing of emotional faces (neutral, happy and sad) primed by short excerpts of musical stimuli (happy and sad). Our behavioural experiment showed a significant effect of musical priming: prior listening to a happy (sad) music enhanced the perceived happiness (sadness) of a face irrespective of facial emotion. Further, this musical priming-induced effect was largest for neutral face. Our electrophysiological experiment showed that such crossmodal priming effects were manifested by event related brain potential components at a very early (within 100 ms post-stimulus) stages of neuronal information processing. Altogether, these results offer new insight into the crossmodal nature of music and its ability to transfer emotion to visual modality.

The subjective experience of time can also be manipulated experimentally. Visual stimuli which appear to be approaching are perceived to be longer in duration than when viewed as static or moving away. Similarly, participants presented with a stream of otherwise identical stimuli, but including one oddball, or "deviant", stimulus, tend to perceive the deviant stimulus as lasting longer than the others. The underlying neural mechanisms of this are unknown, but now the first neuroimaging study of this phenomenon implicates the involvement of brain structures which are thought to be required for cognitive control and subjective awareness.

These results support the existence of multisensory interactions in the perception of duration and, importantly, suggest that vision can modify auditory temporal perception in a pure timing task. Insofar as distortions in subjective duration can neither be accounted for by the unpredictability of an auditory, visual or auditory-visual event, we propose that it is the intrinsic features of the stimulus that critically affect subjective time distortions.

If you look at a waterfall for about 30 seconds, and then shift your gaze to a nearby stationary object, such as a rock or a tree, that object will seem to drift slowly upwards. This well known optical illusion demonstrates a phenomenon called the motion after-effect, which is thought to occur as a result of adaptation - the brain compensates for movement in one direction, causing us to momentarily perceive a stationary objects to be moving in the other.
Although illusory motion can also be induced in the sense of touch, the brain is thought to process visual and tactile motion separately. But now researchers from MIT have found that not only can moving visual stimuli induce a tactile motion after-effect, but also that moving tactile stimuli can induce a visual motion after-effect. The findings, which are published in Current Biology, show that the senses of vision and touch are closely linked, and that each can influence the other.

Motion Aftereffects Transfer between Touch and Vision
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 9, Pages 745-750
T. Konkle, Q. Wang, V. Hayward, C. Moore

VIEWING a stimulus for a prolonged period of time results in a bias in the perception of a stimulus viewed afterwards. For example, after looking at a moving stimulus for some time, a stationary stimulus that is viewed subsequently appears to drift in the opposite direction. These after-effects reveal to us the properties of our perceptual system. They occur because the neurons which are sensitive to the initial stimulus re-calibrate their responses; they adapt to compensate for the earlier enduring stimulus, and so can continue to encode current stimuli efficiently.
It was long thought that the properties of the initial (or adapting) stimulus have to be similar to those of the subsequent (or adapted) stimulus for any after-effect to occur. But a new study published this week in the journal Current Biology contradicts this assumption about perceptual adaptations, by showing that viewing photographs of headless bodies causes the brain to adapt to faces that are viewed afterwards.

Face Adaptation without a Face
Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 1, Pages 32-36
A. Ghuman, J. McDaniel, A. Martin

WHEN making moral judgments, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called "theory of mind", we can meaningfully interpret their behavior, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one's intentions: a "guilty act" only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a "guilty mind", and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgments.
MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that magnetic pulses which disrupt activity in a specific region of the brain's right hemisphere can interfere with the ability to make certain types of moral judgments, so that hypothetical situations involving attempted harm are perceived to be less morally forbidden and more permissible.

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions). Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment (experiment 1, offline stimulation) and during moral judgment (experiment 2, online stimulation). In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the actor's mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms (e.g., actors who intended but failed to do harm): Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms.

In the new study, 90 undergraduates were made to sit at a table across from a full bottle of water. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the "thirsty" condition, and given a serving of pretzels to eat. The rest were placed in the "quenched" condition, and told that they could drink as much of the water as they wanted. Both groups were asked to indicate how long it had been since they last had a drink, how thirsty they were and how appealing the bottle of water was. Finally, they were shown a 1-inch line as a reference, and asked to estimate the distance between their own position and the water bottle.

Although people assume that they see the surrounding environment as it truly is, we suggest that perception of the natural environment is dependent upon the internal goal states of perceivers. Five experiments demonstrated that perceivers tend to see desirable objects (i.e., those that can fulfill immediate goals—a water bottle to assuage their thirst, money they can win, a personality test providing favorable feedback) as physically closer to them than less desirable objects. Biased distance perception was revealed through verbal reports and through actions toward the object (e.g., underthrowing a beanbag at a desirable object). We suggest that seeing desirable objects as closer than less desirable objects serves the self-regulatory function of energizing the perceiver to approach objects that fulfill needs and goals.

People who place an emphasis on positive things and are generally optimistic are sometimes said to "see the world through rose-tinted glasses". According to a new study by Canadian researchers, this is more than just an idiom. The study, which has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides the first direct evidence that the mood we are in affects the way we see things by modulating the activity of the visual cortex. Their findings show that putting on the proverbial rose-tinted glasses of a good mood is not so much about colour, but about the broadness of the view.

Positive and negative emotional states are thought to have originated from fundamentally opposing approach and avoidance behaviors. Furthermore, affective valence has been hypothesized to exert opposing biases in cognitive control. Here we examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging whether the opposing influences of positive and negative states extend to perceptual encoding in the visual cortices.

ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for example, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly.
Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that these are more than just anecdotes, and that performance in sports can actually affect perception. A new study by psychologists at Purdue University now lends more weight to this, by providing evidence that success rate in American football field goals affects how the size of the goal posts is perceived.

Perception relates not only to the optical information from the environment but also to the perceiver’s performance on a given task. We present evidence that the perceived height and width of an American-football field goal post relates to the perceiver’s kicking performance. Participants who made more successful kicks perceived the field goal posts to be farther apart and perceived the crossbar to be closer to the ground compared with participants who made fewer kicks. Interestingly, the current results show perceptual effects related to performance only after kicking the football but not before kicking. We also found that the types of performance errors influenced specific aspects of perception. The more kicks that were missed left or right of the target, the narrower the field goal posts looked. The more kicks that were missed short of the target, the taller the field goal crossbar looked. These results demonstrate that performance is a factor in size perception.

A normal observer can discriminate well over a million different colors under ideal, laboratory conditions of observation. How many colors can be identify when he sees colors singly and is required to identify them with nearly 100 per cent accuracy. The experiments reported here are an attempt to estimate the number of such absolutely-identifiable spectral hues. Observers were tested in a schedule which included familiarization, practice and test runs with four different series of spectral hues. In every case, the test colors were presented singly against a neutral gray background, and the observers were required to identify each according to a simple numerical code. Four series of spectral hues, containing 17, 15, 12 and 10 wavelengths, were used. The results suggest that the average observer can identify no more than 12 spectral hues under these conditions of observation.

Originally posted by KyngKaos
I'm now going to be pissed that I cant recall the article, i think it's in popsci and psychology today, but it's about proving disproving the"time slows" concept. They haven't found anyone who can actually see a display that is operating to fast for normal vision, even when dropping them from a tower(net included) seems decent proof that only our perception is causing the slow mo not that we are actually percieving better or processing faster.

Originally posted by OnceReturned

Your experience is much more subjective, dynamic, inconsistent, and contextually dependant than you had ever thought. If you don’t believe me, read the experiments.


Thoughts?