A MAD OPTICAL ILLUSION has helped provide key information about how our brains process reality.
There is a misstep between the moment the light hits our eyes and our brain calculates what we see.
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The left-turning point appears to be moving diagonally Credit: Patrick Cavanagh
Focus on the black dot on the left side of the screen.
Although our attention is focused on the black dot, it is impossible not to notice the rotating multicolor flash moving diagonally.
But if you follow the rotating flash, you will see that it moves in a vertical straight line.
“It’s important to understand that we’re not seeing reality,” Dartmouth University research professor Patrick Cavanagh told Vox.
“We see a story being created for us.”
Advanced neuroscientific technology and controlled experiments led Cavanagh and his team on a quest to discover how our understanding of reality differs from its true appearance.
Cavanagh’s experiment used the previous optical illusion and a duplicate, except that in the second illusion the spinning dot was actually moving diagonally.
They confirmed that your visual system can tell the difference between the two: It’s not your eyeballs that are being tricked, it’s your brain.
“There’s a whole world of visual analysis, computation and prediction that happens outside of the visual system, it happens in the frontal lobes,” Cavanagh told Vox.
The frontal lobes decode the impulses sent by the eyes and try to make sense of them, sacrificing precision for speed when it comes to small details or distortions.
The brain will rely on past experiences to create an understanding based on something ought seems.
Sometimes we are left with a misinterpretation of the physical world that creates an optical illusion.
Fortunately, optical illusions are mostly examples of entertainment art rather than a basic survival challenge because the brain is usually quite accurate in calculating visual images.
If this were not so, many of our interactions with the physical world could be based on misinterpretations of what really exists.
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education