How brains guesstimate

Experiments show what happens when the mind assumes

SALT LAKE CITY — When the brain can’t nail an answer, it falls back on reasonable guesses. Now scientists have evidence that this strategy may happen very early in the processing of sensory inputs, a study presented February 27 at the Computational and Systems Neuroscience meeting suggests.

The research took advantage of a common misperception of the human brain: People often think that hazy, ill-defined objects are moving more slowly than they really are.