If you are having trouble with this, wikipedia has some good instructions which helped me. First try autostereograms [1] (these are more simpler to see), and then simple random dot stereograms (RDS) [2], and finally magic eye static and moving stereograms.
BTW, the book which introduced RDS: "Foundations of Cyclopean Perception" by Bela Julesz is considered one of the most influential books in cognitive science. With just a computer, using no invasive microelectrodes and animal sacrifices, he proved a fantastic result...stereopsis (fusion of the individual images from each eye) occurs before object recognition!
A few months back I got a stomach ulcer and before going to the doctor, I decided to do some research. I came to realize that the primary cause is not stress or excess spicy food, but a particular stomach bacteria, H. Pylori, going rogue and attacking the mucus lining of the stomach that protects underlying tissue from the strong acid [1]. For this discovery, Drs. Marshall and Warren were awarded the 2005 Nobel prize in medicine [2], as it meant that ulcers were curable with the use of suitable antibiotics.
However, my doctor (and good friend) insisted that there was no permanent cure for stomach ulcers and they could only be managed by taking acid reducing medication (Prilosec) everyday for as long as I lived. I couldn't help wondering if his information was corrupted by big pharma, who always want to keep you hooked onto some drug or the other. So, I had to use extra persuasion and tact to get him to prescribe antibiotics for H. Pylori elimination (and thus permanently curing the ulcer).
I'm a bit skeptical that big pharma's tentacles will NOT reach Watson's doctor successors [3].
In winner-takes-all games, being even in the top 99th percentile is worse than useless.
To use your own example, true you might get better than half the regulars in basketball if you spent 1 hr a day at it, but you'd make exactly $0 being in the top 50th percentile of basketball players. You would be far better off if you had spent that 1 hr/day for a year on improving your coding skills further.
@zanny: A lot of the action in the brain seems to take place at the synapses. These are much smaller structures, and a useful brain scan will need to make precise measurements of the strength of each synapse. I need to study this more closely, but at the moment, I think these measurements maybe impeded by the uncertainty principle.
My guess is that the politicians were sold on the unlimited energy that successful controlled fusion would provide.
As somebody once said: Any problem on Earth can be solved with the careful application of high explosives. The trick is not to be around when they go off.
"Defaults aren't usually in the best interests of those on the bottom (e.g., Ph.D. students), so it's important to know when to reject them and to ask for something different. Of course, there's no nefarious conspiracy against students; the defaults are just naturally set up to benefit those in power."