“THE MIND’S EYE”

 “You probably believe that you are in total mental control of what you think. After all having control over your inner thoughts is without a doubt the most central part of what makes you who you are. Furthermore, an important part of your decision making process is your ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood. So what would happen if you were suddenly unable to mentally override what you know to be false? You know that you are being tricked, but you can’t stop yourself from being tricked, no matter how hard you try. This is a very odd experience indeed! Luckily this is not a normal experience. For the most part, how you perceive the world is fairly accurate. Yet when you encounter illusion, it is just the opposite. There will be a mental split between what you know and what you perceive. What appears to be true is false and what appears to be false is true.

There is a common misperception that what you see in the world is exactly what you get. In fact many books have misleadingly compared the human visual system to a camera, since photographs appear to convey the world accurately. However, this comparison this comparison greatly trivializes the enormous amount of complexity of your visual/perceptual system. A camera only records incoming light. In contrast, your brain interprets the light that enters your eyes. That is a very big and qualitative difference. While your eyes are somewhat like a camera, it is not your eyes that process what you perceive, but your brain. When you look at a photograph, it is your brain interpreting the various relationships in the photographs, not the camera.

Perceiving images, objects and motion is a very complicated process. Only in the last hundred years, and especially the last two decades, have scientists made some progress in understanding vision and perception. Illusions can be a very nice window into this process because they can reveal the hidden constraints that mediate vision and perception. How you “sort it out” is a truly wonderful process; however this process mainly happens not in your eyes, but in your brain. Light waves enter each eye and form a two dimensional image on the photoreceptive cells in the retina located at the back of each eye. These retinal images, whether from a two-dimensional image or from the real world, are semi-flat representations on two flat surfaces (one for each eye). The image on each eye provides a different point of view, which helps you to perform a perception of depth. However, for any single retinal image, there are an infinite variety of possible inputs that could give rise to the same image. For example, a simple straight line projected on your retina could have arisen from a physically straight line, or it could have arisen from a curved line, which happens to be at an angle at which it looks straight. The possibilities are endless. Your visual/perceptual system, however, usually settles for the correct interpretation, and it does this quickly and efficiently.

Your brain continually interprets the light that comes into your eyes according to hidden and subconscious “constraints” that relate to edges, brightness, contrast, color, motion, depth, direction of lighting and so forth. In this way, your visual/perceptual system can quickly and efficiently construct a mental representation of your external world. These constraints are locked into the inner workings of your visual/perceptual system, and you cannot consciously stop your brain from using them.  It is more important for your visual/perceptual system to consistently adhere to these constraints than to occasionally violate them, just because yo have encountered something unusual, paradoxical, or inconsistent.”  Al Seckel ~ The Science of Visual Perception

That is why you can’t stop yourself from being misled by the following illusions.

Enter the gallery >>>

Face or Hands?

Lucky 7?

Poseidon is such an old letch or is he?

How many Angels are here?

Twisted

Having a little trouble focusing?

Back away from your computer screen to see this one!

Never use a possessed chair for a game of Musical Chairs!

Sizing up the Moon

On or Off?

Up or Down?

Front or Back?

Musical Genius

How many Zebras do you think you see?

Couldn't hold it?

Front or Side View?

NOT What You Think!

Good or Evil?

Farewell and Adieu!