How math reveals what your brain hides | with Kit Yates
Why do some people see a white and gold dress, while others see blue and black? And how can a coin flip help us uncover what people won’t admit to in a survey?Mathematician Kit Yates explores how our understanding of the world is shaped as much by missing information as by what’s there. Through illusions, live demos and gripping real-world stories, he introduces three types of “missingness”:
• Intrinsic: how our senses and brains filter, fill in and distort reality
• Extrinsic: how bias, bad polls and filtered data hide the truth before it reaches us
• Constructive: how absence itself can be evidence, from Sherlock Holmes to the coelacanth
Kit’s book, You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng, is available here: https://geni.us/kSBlAbl
This was filmed at the Royal Institution on the 19th of September 2026.
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Kit Yates is an author, broadcaster and academic specialising in the role of mathematics in everyday life. He completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of Oxford and is now Professor of Mathematical Biology and Public Engagement at the University of Bath. He is the author of three books: The Maths of Life and Death (a Sunday Times Science Book of the Year) and now How to Expect the Unexpected and You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng, and is a prominent commentator on the role of mathematics/science in society writing regularly for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC Futures and a range of other media outlets. He regularly appears on radio shows like the BBC’s More or Less, and Inside Science as well as on TV news, current affairs shows and documentaries.
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Chapters:
0:00 Welcome: what is "missingness"?
2:40 Reading tests: how your brain fills in the gaps
8:12 Why perception isn't objective reality
13:01 Why a metal spoon feels colder than a wooden one
15:08 Sensory adaptation (and a deadly gas leak)
19:27 Inattentional blindness: the card trick
23:36 Duck-rabbit and The Dress: why we see different colours
29:23 Anguish Languish and the Stroop effect
35:10 Selection bias: how polls mislead us
45:11 Response bias: why people don't tell the truth
49:13 Live maths game: the randomised response trick
57:13 Sherlock Holmes and the power of absent evidence
1:03:59 The Wason card test and the scientific method
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