Optical illusions that fool the brain

What we see is when we look at something is not “sense data”.  It is not the pattern of photons of different wave lengths falling on the rods and cones of our eyes.  Something in our brains that is the equivalent of image processing software translates this raw data into an image that has meaning.

As my friend Bill Hickok said, that is why we can look at cartoons and see an image rather than just lines on a surface.  And that is why it is possible to fool the brain with optical illusions like the one above.

Hat tip to kottke.org.

Tags: ,

One Response to “Optical illusions that fool the brain”

  1. Isa M. Says:

    This Russian artist turned these models faces into optical illusions. What do you think of them?
    http://www.qltyctrl.com/model-faces-optical-illusions/

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.


%d bloggers like this: