Mind Hacks

Hack #79. Make Events Understandable as Cause and Effect

By following a couple of simple rules, you can show a clear pattern of cause and effect, and ensure your viewer is able to make the connection between separate things happening at the same time.

Research suggests that just as the visual system works to recover the physical structure of the world by inferring properties such as 3-D shape, so too does it work to recover the causal and social structure of the world by inferring properties such as causality and animacy. ¹

Perception is finding structure in sensations. Finding a structure to things lets you hold them in mind and store them in a memory-efficient way. If the structure corresponds to reality, it can also be used to provide predictions about the thing you’re representing. So it’s easier to think of several sections of cable on your desk as all being part of the same mouse lead, and once you’ve assumed that it’s easy to find the mouse, you just follow the cable away from the stack.

We’ve already seen that the brain looks for structure in space [[Hack #75]] and structure in time [[Hack #76]] to organize perceptions. These principles apply to the basic perception of physical objects, as well as helping us understand how we make sense of our body images [[Hack #64]] and the bodies of other people [[Hack #77]].

But our visual system doesn’t look for just static physical structures—it can also pick up on causal relationships between things. You don’t see two things happening ...