cognitive function

A short clip, published by The Sun, of a Russian surface-to-air missile that appears to turn around after launch and hit its own launch site. It was reportedly filmed in Alchevsk during the 2022 war in Ukraine.

A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.

The original invisible gorilla awareness test by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, in which viewers count basketball passes and often miss a gorilla crossing the scene. It demonstrates inattentional blindness.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see. It shows that people integrate visual speech information into what they hear.

CGP Grey's short explainer arguing that caffeine addiction is mostly harmless and may even be beneficial. It covers what caffeine does in the body.

A two-minute BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where what you see of a speaker's mouth changes the sound you hear.

Jack Gallant's lab demonstrates reconstructing movie trailer clips a subject watched from fMRI brain activity, using regression models trained on hours of viewing data. The video shows the original clip beside the reconstruction.

A short Inside Edition segment on Daniel Kish, a blind man who uses tongue clicks as human sonar to ride a bicycle through city traffic. He explains that he hears the reflections of the sounds off objects.

Rick Beato tests his 8-year-old son Dylan's perfect pitch on single notes, note pairs and complex polychords.

An old lab video of a decerebrate cat walking on a treadmill and shifting between gait patterns as the speed changes. It is used to illustrate that much locomotion control comes from the spinal cord and body mechanics rather than the brain.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

The ED-209 boardroom scene from the 1987 film RoboCop, where the enforcement droid malfunctions after giving a man 20 seconds to comply.

A short demo of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon's adaptive keyboard row, which changes its keys based on the user's activity.

A short unscripted demo of writing FizzBuzz in JavaScript with a generator function on a steno keyboard, typos included. It gives a feel for what real coding in stenography looks like.

A three-minute excerpt from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the HAL 9000 computer refuses to open the pod bay doors. It is the famous malfunctioning-AI scene.

A short clip from the film Office Space in which Peter explains his typical workday to the Bobs, the consultants.