(pic source)

Since many of y’all have started school, here’s some advice from Study Hacks about simplifying your life this year so that you’re only moderately caffeinated as opposed to dangerously-approaching-cardiac-arrest caffeinated.

A student presented his schedule (below) and asked if he was overcommitted:

• 5 courses — 24 hours/week in class
• Lab volunteering — 15 hours/week
• Peer educator and mentor — 10 hours/week
• Exercise — 6 hours/week
• Hospital volunteering — 3 hours/week
• Executive of a club — 5 hours/week
• Public speaking club — 8 hours/week

Cal Newport, who runs the Study Hacks site, responded that the student was indeed overcommitted and recommended The Rule of One.  Read his blog to find out more.  There’s only so much Red Bull and Monster drinks your body can handle.

And to spice up your weekend, here’s a video in which you can decapitate someone with your blind spot.  Mari and Jenipher voted against it, but G and I voted for it, and since G is so cool she goes by only a single capital letter, her vote counts twice and we win.

Now don’t freak out.  It’s not an actual decapitation with blood and gore.  It’s an optical illusion.

WARNING:  The following has a high concentration of nerd talk.

We see things because our eyes collect and focus light and send that information to the brain.  But there is a part of the eye that cannot collect and transmit light information because that area has nerves connecting the eye to the brain.  This is why we have a blind spot – there is a part of our eyes that can’t collect light because that space is being used to connect our eyes to our brain.

But the brain likes to make sense of the world and will fill in gaps in a way that seems the most logical.  We see a “decapitation” in the video because 1) the head “disappears” when it falls into our blind spot, and 2) the brain replaces the area where the head should be with the yellow background instead of just leaving that area empty.  Why does our brain do this?  Because it makes more sense to our brain for the yellow background to be continuous instead of abruptly stopping where the head should be.

But THEN, interestingly, when a black bar is passed over the place where the head should be, we see the entire bar even though part of the bar is in our blind spot.  Now that’s weird, right?  If we don’t see the head because it’s in our blind spot, why do we see a single continuous bar instead of 2 disconnected bars?  Shouldn’t we see a gap in the bar where it crosses our blind spot?  But we don’t because our brain likes to fill in the gaps.  It makes more sense to the brain that there is a single bar instead of 2 separate ones, especially since the ends are moving in sync with each other like that.  So it connects the pieces together so that we see a single bar instead of two.

Neat huh?  You can read the full article here.