Widening the View: Looking at the limits of Human Perception

After the success of his SiTP talk, the award-winning "You know less than you think", Paul Hopwood is back for the sequel! Based around his Cognitive Psychology studies, the first talk focussed on the different stages of information processing in the human brain. By looking at research into the brain's ability to acquire, store, retrieve and use information; the talk highlighted that humans have a tendency to severely overestimate their ability to perform these tasks.

This second talk moves away from how good we believe our cognitive toolkit is: and instead looks at how well we think we use it. Through looking at various examples of human perception; the audience will be encouraged to think about such matters as 'Is Common Sense that common and does it make that much sense?', 'Does looking backwards help us to look forwards?', 'How much attention should we pay to randomness?' and 'Are you an idiot or a genius?'