The Mind gauntlet

In the documented cases the eyes are healthy. The distortion arises higher up, in the brain's dedicated face-processing network, which is why only faces warp and the rest of the visual world stays intact.

Troxler fading, first described by Ignaz Troxler in 1804, means unchanging low-contrast or peripheral features fade from awareness as the detecting neurons adapt. Your face system then fills the gaps with a fabricated face.

On difficult or rare skills people reliably rate themselves below the median, the 'worse-than-average effect'. It is the mirror image of the driving illusion, produced by the same self-focused comparison.

Homer calls the sea wine-dark (Greek oinops, wine-faced), never blue, and elsewhere uses colour terms tracking brightness, like a bronze-coloured sky.

The leading hypothesis is that high rates of hippocampal neurogenesis in infancy destabilise existing memory circuits. In mice, boosting neurogenesis speeds forgetting while suppressing it preserves memories longer.

Self-directed speech starts as social speech turned back on the self to regulate behaviour. It does not disappear in later childhood, it goes underground and becomes inner speech.

Boredom directs attention onto time itself, which lengthens felt duration. It is one of the strongest predictors of the feeling that time is passing slowly.

Suppressing an action means monitoring for it, and under mental load that monitor becomes a pointer toward the very error. Told 'don't overshoot' or 'don't miss left', pressured performers tend to do precisely that, sometimes more precisely than otherwise.

Justin Kruger's egocentrism account says you judge yourself against a vividly known self and a barely-pictured crowd, so on an easy task you tilt above average. On hard tasks the same self-focus tips you below.

The body is mapped across the somatosensory cortex, with the hand's region lying adjacent to the face's. That is why touching some amputees' faces evokes sensations in the phantom hand.

Face pareidolia is the perception of a face in something that has no face at all, and it is a normal feature of a healthy brain, not a glitch.

For most adults the earliest retrievable memory sits around age three, with the first couple of years essentially blank. This universal phenomenon is called infantile amnesia, a term Freud coined in 1905.