Our brains can be blinded by emotions, says Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald.

Zald and his colleagues trained twenty-one volunteers to spot a neutral target image — like a picture of a tree or a typical building — out of a series of other images flying by at 10 pictures per second. They asked the subjects to press a key when they spotted their image and indicate whether that image was rotated to the left or the right. He says the volunteers could do this correctly 90 percent of the time. But as he and his team reported in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, if a gory or erotic image was presented before the target image the participants were far more likely to miss the target.

“When an emotional picture appears, it seems to short circuit that processing in the brain that will then help you construct a visual conscious perception,” says co-author Steven Most, a psychologist at Yale University.

According to the Discover article from which I’ve excepted, Zald believes that emotionally charged information can literally block the brain from perceiving subsequent information.

Another clue to the malleability of perception that I blogged about yesterday.

;-)