Here’s something practical - when you feel you've hit a roadblock in reaching a personal goal, such as losing weight, a new study suggests that a change in perspective is what you need. Apparently, if you think about your past progress from the point of view of someone else, you tend to see more change than if you think about it from your own point of view. And if you think more progress has been made, that, of course, is more motivating.

A study in perception from my own country has found that, if you close your eyes and imagine yourself holding a familiar object such as a loaf of bread, you’ll probably grossly overestimate its size. Unless you’re blind – unsurprisingly, I feel, blind people were shown to be considerably more accurate.

And here’s another perception study, this time on a far more interesting phenomenon: synaesthesia. An imaging study has revealed that grapheme-color synesthetes (who see, for example, an ordinary "5," in black ink on a white background, as red, or see a "k" as greenish-blue) show activation in the color-selective regions of the cortex when they view black-and-white letters or numbers. The finding lends support to the hypothesis that cross-activation of adjacent brain regions is the mechanism underlying synesthesia.