Catch your mind in the act
These are real psychology experiments, running live in your browser. Each takes under a minute. Feel the effect happen to you first — then read exactly why it works.
The Stroop Effect
Tap the ink color of each word — not the word itself. Your reading reflex will fight you. This is one of the most replicated findings in all of psychology.
Reading is so automatic that a word's meaning arrives faster than its color. The two answers collide, and your brain must inhibit one — a measurable delay called Stroop interference.
Troxler Fading
Fix your gaze on the white dot at the center. Don't move your eyes. Within 10–20 seconds, the colored clouds around it will fade — some may vanish entirely.
Neurons tuned to unchanging stimuli in your peripheral vision stop responding when nothing moves, so your brain fills the region with its best guess: the background. Move your eyes and the color snaps back. Your visual world is a construction, refreshed only where you attend.
The False Memory Test
Read the list of words that appears — just watch, don't write anything down. Then answer one question. Most people confidently misremember. This is the DRM paradigm, a classic demonstration that memory reconstructs rather than records.
When words are all related to one theme, the brain stores the gist, not the exact list — and later "remembers" the theme word that was never shown. Memory isn't a recording; it's a reconstruction, which is why eyewitness accounts can feel certain and still be wrong.
More experiments are wiring up
Change blindness, the McGurk effect, anchoring bias, inattentional blindness — the Laboratory keeps growing. Explore how each one connects in the mind map.
See the Mind Map →