ELECTRIFYING ILLUSIONS
You can’t always trust what you see or at least not what you think you see. The way the human mind perceives reality through its senses is just an interpretation of limited information. Life provides too much information for the brain to handle quickly, so it has to resort to shortcuts based on prior experiences and tries to put together it’s the best approximation of incomplete images and other information. Your mind is a spectacular tool which is usually able to discern even new things without skipping a beat accurately, but when it fails to make sense of something that generally means we’re falling for an optical illusion.
People are captivated by illusions, for a good reason. Our senses are usually so reliable that it is only natural for us to seek an answer for how they were tricked, especially when knowing the trick doesn’t allow your senses to interpret things correctly. It forces people to look at something from a new perspective and not take their surroundings for granted and that there's always more to be learned beneath the surface of everything we perceive around us day to day. Here are some examples of well-known optical illusions, which people made to test and manipulate human perception.
Impossible Shapes
These are a group of man-made optical illusions; examples include the impossible cube, fork, and triangle. Artists developed and regularly made use of them to boggle the mind. The shapes they presented would defy our understanding of perspective and straight lines in 3D or at least how we interpreted three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane.
A simple change in perspective is usually enough to break the illusion, but obviously, that’s not possible in 2D. The concept of impossible geometry is so prolific that a mobile puzzle game called Monument Valley was made based on traversing through said geometry by shifting your perspective around in 3D.
Rotating Snakes
The Rotating Snakes illusion is a still image that you’re brain sees as moving shapes. This illusion is caused by eye movements, which include subtle ones you make while you stare at something. Your brain is susceptible to movement, so it usually can differentiate your eye movements from the movement of things around you. But due to the contrasts and shapes in the illusion, your brain confuses the two and falsely perceived movement. This illusion is a subset of peripheral drift illusions which won’t work in areas where your vision is entirely focused. Try focusing really hard on a specific part of the image, and you’ll see it doesn’t move, while everything in your periphery still does.
Priming
The illusion created from priming people is as the name suggests a method of setting up an expectation for what something is supposed to represent. The mind needs to fill in the blanks for images and sound without enough information like a rough drawing. Your brain will create a shortcut by either using prior experience or context from its surrounding even if the visual or auditory information isn’t related.
Electrifying illusions
Levitt Lin