Blog #8

Optical illusions are when your brain is perceiving what you are seeing as something different than what is actually in front of you. They show you that you don't always see what your brain is telling you, you are seeing. They are about how your brain perceives information, not about how your eye sees an actual image. Despite the name "optical illusions” which leads you to believe that the illusion is in the eye, it is all in your brain; for this reason, scientist Michael Bach says that they should be called visual illusions. A person’s observation is proven to be subjective by optical illusions. 

Not all optical illusions are made within the confines of real life but some are made within the eye itself. There is an optical illusion called 'floaters' which is where small specks, shadows, or spots seemingly are floating in the air. Not all are seen as dark spot but to some people these areas are white. This happens because some irregularity in eye fluid builds up in that eye and it starts to move around the eye. In this case the illusion is based from actual things going on in the eye, but it then makes the brain thinks it is seeing things in real life that aren't actually there. This phenomenon happens more as people age.

Other optical illusions can be made by hand. Geometrical illusions are fairly simple illusions where the background patterns made certain shapes so lines in the foreground appear to be bending, warping, or breaking. These illusions happen due to so called 'glitches' in our brains as they attempt to process two dimensional forms. An example of one of these would be the Zollner illusion. This is where there is parallel running diagonally and hatch marks at angles running oppositely which causes these lines to look like they are bending towards each other. When this illusion was first discovered in the 1880's it was unknown why this illusion happened. Now scientists believe that our brains expand the acute angles of the hatch marks forcing the lines to appear to be coming together. While the reasoning behind these illusions aren't concrete some scientists believe that this happens due to lateral inhibition. This is where neurons in this part of the brain are responding to the directional differences in the lines, and when one neuron is turned on in the brain its neighbor is then turned off, making it so it is unable to read the direction correctly in the brain. While this explanation works for the Zollner illusion it doesn't explain the reasoning for all the other optical illusion. 


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