Optical illusions expose the imperfection of our eyes. The test confirms it: they deceive you, and only then do you understand why.
Go and trust our eyes, even if they don’t have much to do with an optical illusion, something that makes us almost helpless, but they teach us how our eyes and brain they work together to see.
We live in a three-dimensional world, so it’s our brain that receives clues about depth, shading, lighting, and location, relaying it all to our eyes. But when you look at a two-dimensional image, it is your brain that is fooled, simply because it isn’t receiving the same clues.
Basically we tend to think of what we see as the real world, but this is not always the case, this is where we are deceived by optical illusions. In reality, as scholars and scientists confirm, these are largely distortions, which occur in the early stages of brain processing, before consciousness takes over.
An example that helps us understand this phenomenon better is what is exploited by artists and designers like the illusion of inclination in which perfectly vertical lines appear like this, inclined, because they are positioned on an oriented background.
Information that is distorted, unreliable and subject to illusions
The brain uses context, or background, to interpret a variety of other visual signals in addition to the orientation of objects. For example, use the context to tell colormovement, texture and contrast.
So people rely on their eyes for most tasks, but the information provided by our visual detection system are often distorted, unreliable and subject to illusions.
A viral pastime
This is where optical illusion games come into play, particularly appreciated by many users who enjoy what was previously only in authorized magazines and which is now swarming on social media, online almost everywhere, just google it to have fun at zero kilometres. For example on Youtube there is an account that is the most popularis called Bright side: he has three million subscribers and with 40 optical illusions he managed to total something like a million views.
Among the nicest optical illusions is the one that sees a blue and black rectangle, from which four threads start that tie a banana. Seven seconds to guess which thread ties the banana. Have you tried? It is not thread number two as many have answered, but rather the third. Once again our brain has given wrong information to our eyes, the rest comes by itself.
