I noticed a while back that when the escalators at Green Park  tube weren’t working, when I stepped on and off I felt this weird "jolt", like the escalator was moving, even though it was stationary.

The reason is fairly obvious – I use the two escalators at Green Park twice a day every week day, so with the constant repetition has caused me to develop what I can only describe as an unconscious adaptation to my walking response which smoothes over the transition between the moving escalator and the stationary ground. This is really pretty interesting I think, and makes me wonder how many other automatic adaptations my brain has developed without me noticing. Do I walk differently on surfaces I know to be slippery? Have the years I’ve spent in education subtlety altered my thought patterns?

I heard of one experiment where you wear mirrored glasses that make everything appear upside-down; your brain corrects for this after a few hours and makes the image appear the correct way up. I guess it’s another example of how bafflingly complex and impressive the brain is. The visual and audio processing of the raw information coming in from our senses alone is just unbelievably complex, automatically correlating the inputs from each of your ears and eyes to perform spatialisation.

Guess that’s my thought for the day!