(ORDO NEWS) — Optical illusions, in short, are direct evidence that our brain is damn lazy. He does not carefully analyze each picture with a catch, but interprets it on the basis of previous experience, thereby misleading us.
People created optical illusions long before they deciphered the mechanism of their work. We have selected the most popular and interesting of them and explained how they work.
On the chessboard, section A looks much darker than section B. Remarkably, both sections are actually exactly the same color. In RGB space, it has its own code 120-120-120, and in human language the color is called platinum gray.
Edward Adelson, a professor of vision science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created this so-called “shadow check illusion” in 1995 to demonstrate how the human visual system handles different light conditions.
Our brain knows that surfaces in shadow are darker than usual, so without thinking about the catch, it interprets shadow surfaces as lighter than they physically appear to the eye. So for us section B is much lighter than section A.
In this geometric illusion, discovered by the German physiologist Ewald Hering in 1861, two straight and parallel lines look like they are arching. Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York believes this is due to the human tendency to visually predict the near future.
Because there is a time lag between the moment light hits the retina and the time it takes for the brain to process that light, the human visual system compensates for the delay in the nervous system by generating an image of what will happen one tenth of a second in the future.
The lines converging to a point in this case are signals that make us think that we are moving forward, as if we are passing through a doorway, which is a pair of vertical lines. Therefore, it seems to us that the lines are bent.
One end of the horizontal bar appears darker than the other in the image, fading from light gray to dark gray in the opposite direction from the background. Yes, you guessed it, this is how the brain fools us. It is worth placing that very gray stripe on a solid background, and you will see that it is actually a solid color.
The so-called “simultaneous contrast illusion” is similar to the illusion of a shadow on a chessboard. The brain interprets the two ends of the stripe as being under different lighting, and concludes that the left end of the stripe is a light gray object in low light, while the right end looks like a darker object because it is well lit.
Believe me, nothing is moving in this image. There is still no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of the moving illusion. Some scientists believe that this is due to the continuous “trembling” of the eyes: involuntary eye movements create the illusion of movement of the objects you are focused on.
Others are convinced that when you look around an image, the motion detectors in your brain get confused due to dynamic changes in neurons and think you are actually seeing motion.
In the Ponzo illusion, two horizontal lines of the same size appear to be different. The top horizontal line looks longer because we interpret converging “rails” according to linear perspective as parallel lines going into the distance.
Our brain is used to believing that the farther an object is from us, the smaller it should become. As a result, another mistake in perception, because the horizontal lines are exactly the same.
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