Human observations

[IATIA]

[Nine]

Our brains like to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately they are not very good at it.

[Welsh cake]

[jonb]

It is not your senses that that are fooled. The information coming into your brain is correct, the problem is within the brain on how it categorises that information. I know this may only seem a semantic difference, but it is an important one.

[Rayaan]

[jonb]

[Angrboda]

Thank you, Rayaan. That is indeed powerful.

I'll have to catch your video later, jonb. It looks interesting, but not tonight.

I won't say any of these truly surprised me. I have a life long interest in cognitive bias and other ways in which the mind and the senses misperceive things. As such, the "visual" illusions are a category I don't spend a lot of time on, but enough to have seen most of these effects before. What is not often clearly understood about these "visual" illusions is that there is a basic problem involved in categorizing them. In some, it appears clear that the misrepresentation occurs because the processing on the way to the brain results in the message being processed incorrectly. Then there are those for which the message to the brain appears largely correctly intact, but the brain improperly processes it on its own terms. However for many, many "visual" illusions, it's not entirely clear whether to lay blame at the source or the endpoint, or neither, or both. So in that fundamental sense, some of these illusions are not truly satisfactorily parsed and explained. Or that's what I've gathered from my reading, anyway; as noted, this hasn't been a priority for me, so perhaps I have my understanding here all cattywumpus. I would have to read more to know. But thank you all for the examples. They are indeed very hard for the mind to accept even though, at a higher level, the mind "knows" it should accept them as being other than "what they appear to the mind's eye." A fascinating area, but one I likely will omit to research further at this juncture.

Thanks again.

[jonb]

[Rayaan]

[jonb]