What are Optical Illusions Most of us take vision for granted. It is done with no effort; however, perceiving images, objects and color is a complicated process. When trying to figure out complex illusions, you quickly learn not to trust you eyes and sense of sight. The perception of what it is that we see depends on how one’s brain interprets the object or picture. People are generally able to perceive the world in a way that makes it easy for us to live quite successfully. It is however, not hard at all to make the brain perceive things falsely. There is a certain chemistry to seeing and perceiving. Light waves enter your eyes and then they enter into the photoreceptive cells on your retina. This image that is formed on your retina is actually flat, yet you perceive a world of shape, color and depth. An illusion occurs when a mistake is made and our visual system settles on an incorrect interpretation of the image on one’s retina. The fact that we can recover three-dimensional images from the flat picture on our retina means there are some restraints that are imposed on our interpretation of two-dimensional images. These restraints also cause numerous illusions.Illusions actually are a powerful and fun way of revealing the constraints of vision and perception. A person’s visual system can interpret the scene in many different ways. The image on your retina always remains constant, and you never see a mixture of the two images. You always see one or the other, even though they tend to flip back and forth. Normally this does not happen in the real world, as your visual system has evolved and has countless ways to resolve the uncertainty of the images one sees. Visual perception is basically an ambiguity-solving process. This is called “inverse optics.”Many people will tell you that seeing is believing. You now know that you can’t always trust what you see because all peoples brain...
