Don't worry about the people in your past; There's a reason they didn't make it to your future.
See how your brain reacts to visual illusions
What do you see in the image here? While we definitely cannot see without our eyes, nothing would make sense without input from the brain. The brain has two hemispheres, each divided into four lobes. Each lobe is responsible for different functions. The frontal cortex is responsible for decision making and planning; the temporal lobe for language and memory; and the parietal lobe for spatial skills. The occipital lobe is entirely devoted to vision: It is thus the place where visual illusions happen. One way to understand more about illusion system is to look at how we can trick it, that is, to look at how the brain reacts to visual illusions.
See more illusions and don’t try to be smarter than your brain: Just enjoy being tricked!
Illusory motion: These circles appear to be moving due to illusory motion. While it isn’t entirely well-understood how the brain perceives movement from these images, a 2012 study from St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix found that small, rapid eye movements are responsible for aiding the illusion. If you focus your gaze very intently on one spot of the image, the motion will stop.
It seems normal but now, look at it upright: Lincoln’s eyes do not look quite right! Some neurons in the brain seem specialized in processing faces. Faces are usually seen upright. When presented upside down, the brain no longer recognizes a picture of a face as a face but rather as an object. Neurons processing objects are different from those processing faces and not as specialized. As a consequence these neurons do not respond to face distortions as well. This explains why we miss the weird eyes when the face is inverted.
Do you see gray dots at the intersections of the white lines?
Hermann grid illusion: There are not gray dots in this grid. However “ghost like” gray blobs are perceived at the intersections of the white lines. The gray dots disappear when looking directly at an intersection. This illusion can be explained by a neural process happening in the visual system called lateral inhibition (the capacity of an active neuron to reduce the activity of its neighbors).
The Mueller-Lyer Illusion: The two horizontal lines are of the same length, even though the one at the bottom seems longer. As you know, the visual angle gets smaller with distance, so the brain automatically perceives objects at farther distances to be bigger. In general, lines that have inward flaps, such as corner of a building, are relatively the nearest points of the overall object. Similarly, lines with outward flaps are found at the longer distance, as the farthest corner of a room. So in the Mueller-Lyer illusion, the brain perceives the line with outward flaps to be at a farther point as compared to the line with inward flaps. Consequently, the brain perceives the line with outward flaps to be longer.
This picture is an impossible picture that also contains some subjective contours, such as the Kanizsa Triangle above: A white triangle (pointing down) can be seen in this figure even though no triangle is actually drawn. This effect is known as a subjective or illusory contour. The contour of the triangle is created by the shapes around it.
Did you see a fish of a different color in the bowl? You have just experienced an afterimage. In the retina of your eyes, there are three types of color receptors (cones) that are most sensitive to either red, blue or green. When you stare at a particular color for too long, these receptors get “fatigued”. When you then look at a different background, the receptors that are tired do not work as well. Therefore, the information from all of the different color receptors is not in balance. This will create the color “afterimages”.
