See Better by Believing You Can

By Bruce Bower, Science News April 29, 2010 | 1:04 pm | Categories: Brains and Behavior


Imagine seeing better by thinking differently. That’s a vision with a future, according to Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer.

Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert.

Langer’s new findings build on long-standing evidence that visual perception depends not just on relaying information from the eyes to the brain but on experience-based assumptions about what can be seen in particular situations. Those expectations lead people to devote limited attention to familiar scenes and, as a result, to ignore unusual objects and events.

In perhaps the most eye-popping of Langer’s new findings, 20 men and women who saw a reversed eye chart — arranged so that letters became progressively larger further down the chart, with a giant “E” at the bottom — accurately reported more letters from the smallest two lines than they did when shown a traditional eye chart with the big letters on top. All volunteers had normal eyesight.


These results reflect people’s expectation, based on experience with standard eye charts, that letters are easy to see at the top and become increasingly difficult to distinguish on lower lines, the researchers suggest.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/see-better-by-believing-you-can/

How dare they prove a link between expectation of improvement and a measurable impact on a physiological state?

:sarcasm: