Optical illusions explained
Finally, we have a key to all these darn pictures. I've attempted to find my own answers for these mysteries and even bought a book to read about it but alas, I found nothing and now they have found out that we do in fact see into the future! By one tenth of a second to be exact. I'm sure you all have seen those pictures with the circles and the lines in the middle that seem to bend. According to researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, this illusion occurs because our brain is predicting the way the underlying scene would look in the next moment if we were moving toward the middle point.
Well, there is one answer, but what about all those hundreds more? To go further into seeing the future, Mark Changizi explains more about our seeing ability. He says,
It starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.It's our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd.
So, really all this time we have had this "ability" to actually see into the future, to see others movements, to be able to avoid them? It's all making sense now, so when you are running down the street and you pass a car and someone suddenly opens their door and you see it "a split second before it hits you" and you maneuver away, and this is all your eyes work.
Finally, we have the answer to the question on how these tricks are played on us. We all obviously know it tricks our eyes but how does it trick our eyes? To end the long question Changizi and his research solved it with years of work. To conclude this post, I'd like to quote what Changizi has said about optical illusions.
Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don't match reality.
Via: livescience
