NO MATTER how bad you think you are at maths, your brain is a whiz when it
comes to trigonometry.
To help figure out how far away an object is, people unconsciously measure
the angle between two lines of sight—the horizontal plane and the line to
the base of that object—researchers in Tennessee have found. Once the
brain estimates this angle, it can then calculate its distance with amazing
accuracy using the trigonometric tangent function.
“Previous studies could not conclusively prove it,” says Teng Ooi at the
Southern College of Optometry in Memphis, Tennessee, because they could not…
