Optical Illusion | God's World News

Optical Illusion

02/22/2018
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    It is called curvature blindness. Are those zigzags or wavy lines? What is it that’s tricking our brains? (Kohske Takahashi/i-Perception)
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    When we say, “tricking our eyes,” we’re blaming the wrong organs. It is the brain that interprets the signals being sent by the eyes. (R. Bishop)
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    Stare at the center dot for a while. Then move closer and back from the screen. Do the saw blades start to turn?
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    You can’t look at this grid without seeing dots appear and disappear at the corners of the squares.
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    Believe it or not, those thin red lines going across the screen are not all crooked. They are all parallel to each other.
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What you see is what you get . . . except when it isn’t. Sometimes optical illusions distort what we think we see. Researchers believe that studying optical illusions will yield insights into how the brain works. They also hope to learn about eye and brain diseases.

Three years ago, someone posted a photograph of a dress and asked the public to decide: Was the dress blue or gold? The photo went viral. Millions of people weighed in. Some people insisted they saw blue; some saw only gold. You may have seen a well-known drawing of a wrinkled old woman. Or maybe you saw instead a young lady wearing a hat. These are examples of optical illusions—visual images that deceive the eye and confound the brain.

Artists, scientists, and doctors have studied optical illusions for years. Eyes turn light into electrical impulses. Brains interpret the impulses as images. But eyes and brains can seem to play tricks.

Jesus’ parables baffled people. Some understood the literal meaning of His stories, some the spiritual. Jesus said many “longed to see . . . and did not see.” (Matthew 13:17) His parables weren’t optical illusions but spiritual ones.

Recently, Kohske Takahashi, a psychology professor in Japan, discovered a new optical illusion. Takahashi’s Curvature Blindness Illusion looks specifically at how the brain perceives curves and corners.

Look at the image. What do you see—wavy curves or zigzag angles? Most people see both. Look again. All of the lines are exactly the same shape. The image illustrates the Curvature Blindness Illusion.

The lines in the image are all wavy. There is no zigzag. The optical illusion is caused by two things: (1) the color of the background and (2) the location of light and dark parts of the line. Against the gray background, some lines seem curvy and others seem zigzagged. When the colors change at the top or bottom of the curve, people see a sharp edge. When the colors continue across the top or bottom, people see a curve. The phenomenon occurs only over the center gray part of the image. By looking at the white and black corners, most people can see that all of the lines are wavy.

Takahashi believes the brain’s visual system has something like a default setting. He suggests that when the brain isn’t sure, it may choose to see corners instead of curves. Is Takahashi’s theory correct? Only the eye and brain’s Creator knows for sure.