1. Chapter 1 Inside the Brain

   1. Hacks 1-12

   2. Find Out How the Brain Works Without Looking Inside

   3. Electroencephalogram: Getting the Big Picture with EEGs

   4. Positron Emission Tomography: Measuring Activity Indirectly with PET

   5. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: The State of the Art

   6. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Turn On and Off Bits of the Brain

   7. Neuropsychology, the 10% Myth, and Why You Use All of Your Brain

   8. Get Acquainted with the Central Nervous System

   9. Tour the Cortex and the Four Lobes

   10. The Neuron

   11. Detect the Effect of Cognitive Function on Cerebral Blood Flow

   12. Why People Don’t Work Like Elevator Buttons

   13. Build Your Own Sensory Homunculus

2. Chapter 2 Seeing

   1. Hacks 13-33

   2. Understand Visual Processing

   3. See the Limits of Your Vision

   4. To See, Act

   5. Map Your Blind Spot

   6. Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision

   7. When Time Stands Still

   8. Release Eye Fixations for Faster Reactions

   9. Fool Yourself into Seeing 3D

   10. Objects Move, Lighting Shouldn’t

   11. Depth Matters

   12. See How Brightness Differs from Luminance: The Checker Shadow Illusion

   13. Create Illusionary Depth with Sunglasses

   14. See Movement When All Is Still

   15. Get Adjusted

   16. Show Motion Without Anything Moving

   17. Motion Extrapolation: The “Flash-Lag Effect”

   18. Turn Gliding Blocks into Stepping Feet

   19. Understand the Rotating Snakes Illusion

   20. Minimize Imaginary Distances

   21. Explore Your Defense Hardware

   22. Neural Noise Isnt a Bug; Its a Feature

3. Chapter 3 Attention

   1. Hacks 34-43

   2. Detail and the Limits of Attention

   3. Count Faster with Subitizing

   4. Feel the Presence and Loss of Attention

   5. Grab Attention

   6. Don’t Look Back!

   7. Avoid Holes in Attention

   8. Blind to Change

   9. Make Things Invisible Simply by Concentrating (on Something Else)

   10. The Brain Punishes Features that Cry Wolf

   11. Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games

4. Chapter 4 Hearing and Language

   1. Hacks 44-52

   2. Detect Timing with Your Ears

   3. Detect Sound Direction

   4. Discover Pitch

   5. Keep Your Balance

   6. Detect Sounds on the Margins of Certainty

   7. Speech Is Broadband Input to Your Head

   8. Give Big-Sounding Words to Big Concepts

   9. Stop Memory-Buffer Overrun While Reading

   10. Robust Processing Using Parallelism

5. Chapter 5 Integrating

   1. Hacks 53-61

   2. Put Timing Information into Sound and Location Information into Light

   3. Don’t Divide Attention Across Locations

   4. Confuse Color Identification with Mixed Signals

   5. Don’t Go There

   6. Combine Modalities to Increase Intensity

   7. Watch Yourself to Feel More

   8. Hear with Your Eyes: The McGurk Effect

   9. Pay Attention to Thrown Voices

   10. Talk to Yourself

6. Chapter 6 Moving

   1. Hacks 62-69

   2. The Broken Escalator Phenomenon: When Autopilot Takes Over

   3. Keep Hold of Yourself

   4. Mold Your Body Schema

   5. Why Can’t You Tickle Yourself?

   6. Trick Half Your Mind

   7. Objects Ask to Be Used

   8. Test Your Handedness

   9. Use Your Right Brain—and Your Left, Too

7. Chapter 7 Reasoning

   1. Hacks 70-74

   2. Use Numbers Carefully

   3. Think About Frequencies Rather than Probabilities

   4. Detect Cheaters

   5. Fool Others into Feeling Better

   6. Maintain the Status Quo

8. Chapter 8 Togetherness

   1. Hacks 75-80

   2. Grasp the Gestalt

   3. To Be Noticed, Synchronize in Time

   4. See a Person in Moving Lights

   5. Make Things Come Alive

   6. Make Events Understandable as Cause and Effect

   7. Act Without Knowing It

9. Chapter 9 Remembering

   1. Hacks 81-92

   2. Bring Stuff to the Front of Your Mind

   3. Subliminal Messages Are Weak and Simple

   4. Fake Familiarity

   5. Keep Your Sources Straight (if You Can)

   6. Create False Memories

   7. Change Context to Build Robust Memories

   8. Boost Memory Using Context

   9. Think Yourself Strong

   10. Navigate Your Way Through Memory

   11. Have an Out-of-Body Experience

   12. Enter the Twilight Zone: The Hypnagogic State

   13. Make the Caffeine Habit Taste Good

10. Chapter 10 Other People

    1. Hacks 93-100

    2. Understand What Makes Faces Special

    3. Signal Emotion

    4. Make Yourself Happy

    5. Reminisce Hot and Cold

    6. Look Where I’m Looking

    7. Monkey See, Monkey Do

    8. Spread a Bad Mood Around

    9. You Are What You Think

1. Colophon

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The tool on the cover of Mind Hacks is an incandescent light bulb. While many assume that Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb in 1879, Edison's actual achievement was to advance the design of the light bulb from a patent he purchased in 1875 from Canadian inventors Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans. Edison's improvement was to place a carbon filament in a vacuum bulb, which then burned for 40 hours. An English chemist, Humphrey Davy, invented the first electric light-an arc lamp-by connecting two wires to a battery and attaching a strip of charcoal in the middle of the circuit. Other inventors continued to make various incremental improvements in such areas as the filaments and the process for creating a vacuum in the bulb, but in 1879, Edison developed a triple threat: a carbon filament, lower voltage, and an improved vacuum in the bulb.

In 1882, Pearl Street Station, in New York City, was the first central electricity-generating station constructed to support the light bulb invention. Although the alternating-current method of generating electricity proposed by Nikola Tesla proved to be the superior technical solution, Edison was engaged in a battle for control of America's electric infrastructure. Edison declared that his direct current system was safe and that alternating current was a deadly menace, which he publicly demonstrated for years by using alternating current to electrocute dogs and cats.

But in 1893, when alternating current was used at the Chicago World's Fair to light 100,000 incandescent lightbulbs, the nearly 27 million people who attended the Columbian Exposition saw the safe and impressive demonstration of that technology. The event signaled the demise of direct current systems in the United States. Sarah Sherman was the production editor and proofreader for Mind Hacks, and Norma Emory was the copyeditor. Meghan Lydon provided production assistance. Mary Anne Weeks Mayo and Emily Quill provided quality control. Lucie Haskins wrote the index.

Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is an original photograph. Clay Fernald produced the cover layout with Quark XPress 4.1 using Adobe's Helvetica Neue and ITC Garamond fonts.

David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted by Julie Hawks to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Helvetica Neue Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. This colophon was written by Reg Aubry.