While we're on the subject of the brain handling things at a more raw level than you might expect, here's another interesting group of experiments: http://en.m.

While we're on the subject of the brain handling things at a more raw level than you might expect, here's another interesting group of experiments: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation. At university, we carried out some of Shepard and Merzlar's experiments to measure the rate at which our minds could rotate objects. Even though it subjectively feels like the mind has a graphics card that can rotate objects, it was still surprising to discover that the perception isn't an illusion—and to be able to measure our own mental rotation rates in degrees-per-second. It's not mentioned on the Wikipedia page, but I remember carrying out an experiment that showed that if it takes you, say, one second to mentally rotate an object by 60 degrees, then at the 0.5-second mark, you really do have a mental representation of an object that's rotated halfway (i.e., by 30 degrees). Maybe this isn't surprising to some people, but psychology is full of examples of the brain taking outrageous shortcuts, so it surprised me that mental rotation—which would appear to require a prohibitive amount of processing power—isn't being fudged by the brain.