Everyone likes entertaining optical illusions. When faced with them for the first time, most people behave like children and are instantly addicted to them. There are more and more optical illusions and they are more and more exciting.
It seems that optical illusions are just fun, but this fun gives us the right to deep philosophical conclusions. Illusions show us in a clear and unambiguous way that we perceive the world around us not at all as it is. The sensations of perception clearly demonstrate that the mental model formed by the brain does not always correspond to reality.
The Cafe Wall illusion, created by artist Victoria Skye, was one of the top contenders for the 2017 Best Illusion of the Year competition. Believe it or not, all horizontal lines are perfectly parallel. To prove it to yourself, simply squint or compare the squares on different sides of the image.
Note that even after you are completely sure that the lines are parallel, the illusion continues to work. Perception is largely involuntary and in many ways does not correspond to our abstract knowledge of the world.
David Novick's variation of Illusion of Brightness is a demonstration of the fact that we do not directly perceive the colors of the objects around us. Instead, the perceptual system offers us its "guess" based on the environment of the objects. The circles in the image are the same color. The only thing that sets them apart is the color of the lines crossing them.
The world-famous optical illusions of Japanese psychology professor Akioshi Kitaoka make one believe that images move. To make sure that the image is static, you need to focus your vision on one part of the picture and the movement, if observed, stops. This convinces us that the movement of the drawing is created by our imagination.
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The rice waves seem to be an animated image, but they are not. Certain shading and a sequence of yellow spots trigger the movement-responsive region of the brain. This stimulates the perception of a still picture as a moving one. Interestingly, about 5 percent of people seem to be immune to this illusion.
If you look at the "Illusion of Brightness" by Akioshi Kitaoka, our visual system perceives the action as if a gray square is transferred from a shadow to a bright light, and then to a dark shadow. To make the square look dark on a light background, it must be darker.
Conversely, in order for a square to look light on a dark background, it must be very light, so the visual system independently adjusts its brightness. Our brains do much more "quietly" than you might imagine.
Another optical illusion of perception of relative sizes, named after the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who discovered it. Its essence lies in the fact that two circles of exactly the same size are placed side by side. There are large circles around one of them, while the other is surrounded by small circles, while the left circle appears to be smaller than the right one.
We do not perceive the immediate size of objects, just as we do with color and brightness. Our brains make inferences about size based on clues, including the relative size of other nearby objects.
The dynamic Mueller-Lyer illusion occurs when observing the segments framed by arrows. All blue and red lines are the same length; none of them move or change size, and they are all on the same level, only the arrows change. This illusion is a new variation of the Mueller-Lyer optical illusion.
Despite a lot of research, the nature of the illusion is not fully understood. The most modern interpretation explains the illusion as a statistical result of observation of external images: in scenes, natural visual elements, framed by cusps, are usually shorter than those with tails. In addition, there is controversy about whether it affects people everywhere or vice versa - it is a specific phenomenon of a particular culture.
The Rotating Rings illusion is of interest to many people. Every time you switch your attention from a red dot to a yellow dot or vice versa, both wheels begin to rotate in the opposite direction. The illusion exploits differences in how we interpret movement in the center of the visual field versus the periphery.
The spinning dancer illusion was created by Japanese designer Nobuyuki Kayahara in 2003. If you look at the dancer on the left and the dancer in the center, the center dancer will rotate clockwise. If you look at the dancer to the right and the center dancer, the dancer in the middle will start to rotate counterclockwise.
The secret is that the central image is ambiguous: it can be interpreted as a dancer spinning in any direction. The dancers on the right and left, on the other hand, include additional clues that evoke a very specific interpretation. The brain then transfers the same interpretation to the central figure.
The illusion that makes Vincent Van Gogh's painting Starry Night “set in motion” attracts many. In order to see this, you need to look at the center of the rotating circles for ten seconds, and then turn your gaze to the picture.
This is an example of a follow-up effect. When you look at the spiral, your visual system begins to create compensatory movement to ignore this predictable process. But then, when you look at a still picture, this reaction still remains, although there is no movement anymore. This creates the false impression that there is movement in the opposite direction, which is superimposed on the details of the painting.