Game · The Mind

Cluster

Sixteen curiosities, four hidden threads. Spot the groups before your guesses run out, then meet the quiet memory trick you just pulled off. A fresh board every day.

Find 4 groups of 4 every fact sourced

Sixteen curiosities, four hidden groups of four. Pick four you think belong together and hit Group. You get four wrong guesses before the answers reveal themselves.

Pick four that belong together. Tries left: 4

Our sources

// every fact this game reveals was checked before it went up

✓ The 'reflexes' group (goosebumps, hiccups, yawning, the post-pee shiver) are all involuntary reflexes, rapid, automatic responses run by the brainstem or spinal cord, outside conscious control. , Standard neurophysiology (reflex arc); Purves et al., Neuroscience

✓ The 'memory' group (déjà vu, the doorway effect, forgotten dreams, childhood amnesia) reflects that human memory is reconstructive rather than a faithful recording, which makes it prone to systematic gaps and errors. , Schacter, 'The Seven Sins of Memory,' 2001; reconstructive-memory research

✓ The 'illusions' group (the blind spot, hearing a silent GIF, bouba/kiki, seeing faces in things) all show perception working as the brain's best guess, unconscious inference, which is exactly what illusions expose. , Gregory, 'Perceptions as hypotheses,' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 1980

✓ The 'sleep' group (sleep paralysis, the hypnic jerk, exploding head syndrome, biphasic sleep) cluster at the borderland between waking and sleep, when REM or arousal systems intrude on the transition (hypnagogia/hypnopompia). , Sleep-medicine reviews of parasomnias and the wake-sleep transition (hypnagogia)

✓ Seeing four scattered items as a single group is 'chunking': grouping information into meaningful units lets working memory hold far more than its limit of roughly seven items. , Miller, 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,' Psychological Review, 1956

✓ Board two, group 'the body moved by feeling' (butterflies, a lump in the throat, blushing, crying) reflects that emotions produce bodily responses through the autonomic nervous system, the physiological arousal that James and Lange argued is part of the emotion itself. , James, 'What is an Emotion?', Mind, 1884; standard affective neuroscience of autonomic arousal

✓ Board two, group 'smell's line to the past' (smell-triggered memory, body odours, grass, asparagus) reflects that the olfactory system projects directly to the amygdala and hippocampus, giving smell an unusually strong, fast link to memory and emotion. , Herz & Engen, 'Odor memory: Review and analysis,' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1996

✓ Board two, group 'when the familiar turns alien' (the mirror-face effect, your recorded voice, semantic satiation, cringe at old memories) all show that familiarity is an active brain signal that can be disrupted, making well-known faces, sounds and words feel briefly strange (jamais vu). , Moulin, 'The Cognitive Neuroscience of Familiarity'; Severance & Washburn on semantic satiation, 1907

✓ Board two, group 'a feeling from nothing solid' (phantom limbs, the high-place urge, feeling watched, infrasound dread) reflects that the brain constructs perception predictively, so it can generate a vivid sensation with no matching external cause. , Ramachandran & Hirstein, 'The perception of phantom limbs,' Brain, 1998; predictive-processing accounts of perception