How the Eyes can Trick the Brain

We can't always trust what we think we see. Remember, our brain is stuck in the enclosed darkness of our skull and it must try to interpret the messages that come via the eyes. The information that our eyes gather can, due to such reasons as competing stimuli as excessive colour, movement, tilt or brightness, create a visual picture which differs from the objective, measurable reality.

How we see things often depends on our perspective, or, how we see things as a whole. For example, what do you see below? A duck or a rabbit?

And is the dancer below, spinning clock-wise or anti-clockwise?

Our brain has to make sense of the incoming visual perceptions by organising them in certain ways, putting information together like a jigsaw and filling in missing parts. Notice how your brain creates an impression of triangles, that are not really there?

With some things our brain completely fails. For example, the impossible 2 dimensional drawings which are interpreted by our brains as being 3 dimensional, even though viewing the object for a few minutes makes us realise that it is impossible for the object to exist.

The the Dutch artist M. C. Escher used many impossible paradox illusions in his art works.

Ascending and Descending by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher

 


Books To read


The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions, by Al Seckel. Wonderful trickery!