MANY optical illusions can illustrate how your brain constructs ‘reality’.
Optical illusions often use shape, color, and movement to trick the human brain.
1
The square illusion of ‘flash lag’ illustrates how our brains can construct their own ‘reality’. Credit: Stuart Anstis and Patrick Cavanagh of UCSD
And ‘visual optical illusions’, specifically, can activate our visual system in a way that alters our perception of reality.
An example of this is the ‘flash delay squares’ illusion created by Stuart Anstis and Patrick Cavanagh,
In this illusion, two frames blink red and blue.
Although the boxes are the same size and placed in the same place, the red box appears smaller.
However, the movement of the white background confuses the brain.
How does this work?
Illusions that use the flash effect generally cause a stationary object to flash rapidly directly below the moving object.
This, in turn, causes our brain to perceive the stationary object as “dragging”, even though the two objects are in the same horizontal position at the time of the flash.
“The visual system assumes [the boxes] They’re also moving, and we can see where they would be if they had continued the background motion,” neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a researcher at Dartmouth College, told Vox.
“It’s important to realize that we’re not seeing reality.”
– We see the story being created for us.
Another similar optical illusion involves the ‘moving square’ by Japanese psychologist and artist Akiyoshi Kitaoka.
In this illusion, the square moves between the spectrum of two hues: orange and blue.
This illusion works by asking your brain to guess the color of the moving square.
“Note that the physical color of the square doesn’t change,” Brian Resnick explained to Vox.
“Maybe you’re looking at this illusion and you feel like your brain is broken.”
“It’s not. It just reveals that our perception of color is not absolute.”
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education