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How Your Eyes Trick Your Mind
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Via BBC Future [Follow the link to see more optical illusions]:
Visual, or optical, illusions show us that our minds tend to make assumptions about the world – and what you think you see is often not the truth.
Throughout history, curious minds have questioned why our eyes are so easily fooled by these simple drawings. Illusions, we have found, can reveal everything from how we process time and space to our experience of consciousness.
Scroll down our interactive guide to find out why.
Early illusions
Illusions have a long history, going as far back as the ancient Greeks.
In 350BC, Aristotle noted that that “our senses can be trusted but they can be easily fooled”.
He noticed that if you watch a waterfall and shift your gaze to static rocks, the rocks appear to move in the opposite direction of the flow of water, an effect we now call “motion aftereffect” or the waterfall illusion.
Tracking the flow of the water seems to “wear out” certain neurons in the brain as they adapt to the motion. When you then shift your gaze to the rocks, other competing neurons over-compensate, causing the illusion of movement in the other direction.
Mind shift
The real boom in studying illusions began in the 19th Century. A school of scientists who studied perception – among many other things – created simple illusions to shed light on how the brain perceives patterns and shapes, which kick-started the early theories on how our eyes can play tricks on our mind.
The Ebbinghaus illusion, for example, revealed that our brain makes judgements about size using adjacent objects – and this can be manipulated. The orange circles here are actually the same size.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2015/02/how-your-eyes-trick-your-mind/
