Visual illusions - what are they? Optical illusion (14 illusions)

The coolest optical illusions! They will help your brain switch gears and take your mind off things a bit, but be careful: as we know, overdosing on medication can be dangerous!

Here is a simply incredible collection of modern optical illusion pictures, with which you will spend time enjoying the tricks and sensations produced by your brain.

Optical illusion- an impression of a visible object or phenomenon that does not correspond to reality, i.e. optical illusion. Translated from Latin, the word “illusion” means “error, delusion.” This suggests that illusions have long been interpreted as some kind of malfunction visual system. Many researchers have been studying the causes of their occurrence.

Be careful!

Some illusions may cause tears, headache and disorientation in space.

Pulsating poster

At whatever point in the picture you focus your gaze, the picture never stops moving for a second.

Kaleidoscope

An illusion of movement based on the work of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a professor of psychology at the University (Ritsumeikan) in Tokyo, world famous for his many illusions of movement.

Eye?

A shot from photographer Liamm, who was filming a foam sink but soon realized it was an eye staring back at him.

Four circles

Be careful! This optical illusion can cause headaches lasting up to two hours.

Ferris wheel

Which direction does the wheel spin?

Invisible chair

The optical effect, which gives the viewer a false impression of the location of the seat, is due to the original design of the chair, invented by the French studio Ibride.

Hypnosis

Stare without blinking at the middle of the image for 20 seconds, and then move your gaze to someone’s face or just a wall.

flying cube

What looks like a real cube floating in the air is actually a drawing on a stick.

The Birth of Animation

User brusspup creates animated images by overlaying a grid of black parallel lines over the finished drawing. Before our eyes, static objects begin to move.

Look at the cross in the center

Peripheral vision turns beautiful faces into monsters.

Ordering squares

The four white lines appear to be moving randomly. But once you put images of squares on them, everything becomes quite natural.

Volumetric Rubik's Cube

The drawing looks so realistic that there is no doubt that this is a real object. Twisting the piece of paper, it becomes obvious that this is just a deliberately distorted image.

Same or different?

How can two cigarettes be different and the same size at the same time?

This is not animation

This is not an animated gif. This is an ordinary picture, all elements of which are absolutely motionless. It is your perception that is playing with you. Hold your gaze for a few seconds at one point, and the picture will stop moving.

Aren't you tired? Then…

Brain explosion! Optical illusions on the verge of madness!

Endless chocolate

If you cut a chocolate bar 5 by 5 and rearrange all the pieces in the order shown, then out of nowhere an extra piece of chocolate will appear. Our readers have figured out the secret.

Black and white or color

If you look closely at a point in the center of a black and white image for 15 seconds, the picture takes on color.

Impossible elephant

Drawing by Roger Shepard.

Illusion of color

Without looking up, look at the cross and you will see how the purple spots turn green. And then they disappear completely.

Black and white illusion

Look at the four dots in the center of the picture for thirty seconds, then move your gaze to the ceiling and blink. What did you see?

Interior illusion

Chessboard squares

Are squares A and B of the chessboard different colors? The Illusion of Color Perception Published by a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute of Technology Edward H. Adelson in 1995.

And here is this incredible project designers David Stanfield and Al Boardman. They created web spaces where they invited all their creative colleagues to take part in supporting the project, which was called “9 squares”. As planned, each designer should imagine a 350 pixel square with an animation lasting 3 seconds, using only 4 colors. When finished, the work is combined into 3x3 squares. To the surprise of David and El, their project attracted many like-minded people, regularly adding to the “9 squares” collection.

Incredible optical illusions!

People have been familiar with optical illusions for thousands of years. The Romans made 3D mosaics to decorate their homes, the Greeks used perspective to build beautiful pantheons, and at least one Paleolithic stone figurine depicts two different animals, which can be seen depending on the point of view.

Mammoth and bison

A lot can get lost on the way from your eyes to your brain. In most cases this system works great. Your eyes move rapidly and almost imperceptibly from side to side, delivering scattered pictures of what is happening to your brain. The brain organizes them, determines the context, putting the puzzle pieces together into something that makes sense.

For example, you are standing on a street corner, cars are passing through a pedestrian crossing, and the traffic light is red. Pieces of information add up to the conclusion: now is not the best best time to cross the street. Most of the time this works great, but sometimes, even though your eyes are sending visual signals, your brain is trying to decipher them.

In particular, this often happens when templates are involved. Our brain needs them to process information faster, using less energy. But these same patterns can lead him astray.

As you can see in the image of the chessboard illusion, the brain doesn't like to change patterns. When small specks change the pattern of a single chess square, the brain begins to interpret them as a large bulge in the center of the board.

The brain also often makes mistakes about color. The same color can look different on different backgrounds. In the image below, both of the girl's eyes are the same color, but by changing the background, one appears blue.

The next optical illusion is the Cafe Wall Illusion.

Researchers at the University of Bristol discovered this illusion in 1970 thanks to a mosaic wall in a cafe, which is where it gets its name.

The gray lines between the rows of black and white squares appear to be at an angle, but in fact they are parallel to each other. Your brain, confused by the contrasting and closely spaced squares, sees the gray lines as part of a mosaic, above or below the squares. As a result, the illusion of a trapezoid is created.

Scientists suggest that the illusion is created due to the joint action of neural mechanisms different levels: retinal neurons and visual cortex neurons.

The illusion with arrows has a similar mechanism of action: the white lines are actually parallel, although they do not seem so. But here the brain is confused by the contrast of colors.

An optical illusion can also be created due to perspective, for example, like the chessboard illusion.

Due to the fact that the brain is familiar with the laws of perspective, it seems to you that the distant blue line is longer than the green one in the foreground. In fact they are the same length.

The next type of optical illusion is pictures in which two images can be found.

In this painting, hidden between the flowers are the faces of Napoleon, his second wife Marie-Louise of Austria and their son. Such images are used to develop attention. Found faces?

Here is another picture with a double image called “My Wife and Mother-in-Law.”

It was invented by William Ely Hill in 1915 and published in the American satirical magazine Puck.

The brain can also add color to pictures, as in the case of the fox illusion.

If you look at it for a while left side pictures with a fox, and then turn your gaze to the right one, it will turn from white to reddish. Scientists still do not know what causes such illusions.

Here's another illusion with color. Look at the woman's face for 30 seconds and then look at a white wall.

Unlike the fox illusion, in this case the brain inverts the colors - you see a projection of a face on a white background that acts as a movie screen.

Here's a visual demonstration of how our brain processes visual information. In this incomprehensible mosaic of faces you are without special labor recognize Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The brain creates an image from pieces of information received. Without this ability, we would not be able to drive a car or cross the road safely.

The last illusion is two colored cubes. Is the orange cube inside or outside?

Depending on your point of view, the orange cube may be inside the blue cube or floating on the outside. This illusion works due to your perception of depth, and the interpretation of the picture depends on what your brain considers true.

As you can see, despite the fact that our brain copes well with everyday tasks, in order to deceive it, it is enough to break the established pattern, use contrasting colors or the desired perspective.

Do you think this is often the case in real life?

People have been familiar with optical illusions for thousands of years. The Romans made 3D mosaics to decorate their homes, the Greeks used perspective to build beautiful pantheons, and at least one Paleolithic stone figurine depicts two different animals that can be seen depending on your point of view.

Mammoth and bison

A lot can get lost on the way from your eyes to your brain. In most cases this system works great. Your eyes move rapidly and almost imperceptibly from side to side, delivering scattered pictures of what is happening to your brain. The brain organizes them, determines the context, putting the puzzle pieces together into something that makes sense.

For example, you are standing on a street corner, cars are passing through a pedestrian crossing, and the traffic light is red. Pieces of information add up to a conclusion: now is not the best time to cross the street. Most of the time this works great, but sometimes, even though your eyes are sending visual signals, your brain is trying to decipher them.

In particular, this often happens when templates are involved. Our brain needs them to process information faster, using less energy. But these same patterns can lead him astray.

As you can see in the image of the chessboard illusion, the brain doesn't like to change patterns. When small specks change the pattern of a single chess square, the brain begins to interpret them as a large bulge in the center of the board.

The brain also often makes mistakes about color. The same color can look different on different backgrounds. In the image below, both of the girl's eyes are the same color, but by changing the background, one appears blue.

The next optical illusion is the Cafe Wall Illusion.

Researchers at the University of Bristol discovered this illusion in 1970 thanks to a mosaic wall in a cafe, which is where it gets its name.

The gray lines between the rows of black and white squares appear to be at an angle, but in fact they are parallel to each other. Your brain, confused by the contrasting and closely spaced squares, sees the gray lines as part of a mosaic, above or below the squares. As a result, the illusion of a trapezoid is created.

Scientists suggest that the illusion is created due to the joint action of neural mechanisms at different levels: retinal neurons and neurons of the visual cortex.

The illusion with arrows has a similar mechanism of action: the white lines are actually parallel, although they do not seem so. But here the brain is confused by the contrast of colors.

An optical illusion can also be created due to perspective, for example, like the chessboard illusion.

Due to the fact that the brain is familiar with the laws of perspective, it seems to you that the distant blue line is longer than the green one in the foreground. In fact they are the same length.

The next type of optical illusion is pictures in which two images can be found.

In this painting, hidden between the flowers are the faces of Napoleon, his second wife Marie-Louise of Austria and their son. Such images are used to develop attention. Found faces?

Here is another picture with a double image called “My Wife and Mother-in-Law.”

It was invented by William Ely Hill in 1915 and published in the American satirical magazine Puck.

The brain can also add color to pictures, as in the case of the fox illusion.

If you look at the left side of the fox picture for a while and then move your gaze to the right side, it will turn from white to reddish. Scientists still do not know what causes such illusions.

Here's another illusion with color. Look at the woman's face for 30 seconds and then look at a white wall.

Unlike the fox illusion, in this case the brain inverts the colors - you see a projection of a face on a white background that acts as a movie screen.

Here's a visual demonstration of how our brain processes visual information. In this incomprehensible mosaic of faces, you can easily recognize Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The brain creates an image from pieces of information received. Without this ability, we would not be able to drive a car or cross the road safely.

The last illusion is two colored cubes. Is the orange cube inside or outside?

Depending on your point of view, the orange cube may be inside the blue cube or floating on the outside. This illusion works due to your perception of depth, and the interpretation of the picture depends on what your brain considers true.

As you can see, despite the fact that our brain copes well with everyday tasks, in order to deceive it, it is enough to break the established pattern, use contrasting colors or the desired perspective.

Do you think this is often the case in real life?

We are accustomed to taking the world around us for granted, so we do not notice how our brain deceives its own masters.

imperfection of our binocular vision, unconscious false judgments, psychological stereotypes and other distortions of worldview serve as the reason for the occurrence of optical illusions. There are a huge number of them, but we tried to collect the most interesting, crazy and incredible of them for you.

Impossible figures

Impossible trident

Classic blivet is perhaps the most striking representative of optical patterns from the “impossible figures” category. No matter how you try, you will not be able to determine where the middle prong originates.

Another striking example is the impossible Penrose triangle.

It is in the form of a so-called “endless staircase”.

And also “The Impossible Elephant” by Roger Shepard.

Ames room

How does the Ames room work?

Movement Illusions

floating star

There are quite a few similar illusions of movement, that is, static images that appear to be moving. For example, the famous rotating circle.

Or yellow arrows on a pink background: when you look closely, they seem to sway back and forth.

Caution: This image may cause eye pain or dizziness in people with weak vestibular systems.

Honestly, this is a regular picture, not a GIF! Psychedelic spirals seem to drag you somewhere into a universe full of strangeness and wonder.

Changeling illusions

Two classic illusions-shifters: nurse/old woman and beauty/ugly.

A more highly artistic picture with a trick - when turned 90 degrees, the frog turns into a horse.

Other “double illusions” are more subtle.

Girl/old woman

Old people/Mexicans

Lovers/dolphins

The list of such dual pictures can be continued endlessly:

In the picture above, most people see the Indian's face first, and only then look to the left and see the silhouette in the fur coat. The image below is usually interpreted by everyone as a black cat, and only then does a mouse appear in its outline.

A very simple upside-down picture - something like this can be easily done with your own hands.

Illusions of color and contrast

Gray squares

This trick is possible due to the way our brain works. A shadow without sharp boundaries falls on square B. Thanks to the darker "surrounding" and the smooth shadow gradient, it appears to be significantly lighter than Square A.

Green spiral

Is the dress white and gold or blue and black?

The explanation of the dress phenomenon is very simple: as in the case of gray squares, everything depends on the imperfect chromatic adaptation of our visual organs. As you know, the human retina consists of two types of receptors: rods and cones. Rods capture light better, while cones capture color better. Each person has a different ratio of cones to rods, so the determination of the color and shape of an object is slightly different depending on the dominance of one or another type of receptor.

Those who saw the dress in white and gold noticed the brightly lit the background and decided that the dress was in the shade, which means White color should be darker than usual. If the dress seemed blue-black to you, it means that your eye first of all paid attention to the main color of the dress, which in this photo actually has blue tint. Then your brain judged that the golden hue was black, lightened due to the sun's rays directed at the dress and the poor quality of the photo.

In reality the dress was blue with black lace.

Here's another photo that baffled millions of users who couldn't decide whether it was a wall in front of them or a lake.

Everything we see in reality we take for granted. Whether it's a rainbow after the rain, a child's smile, or a gradually turning blue sea in the distance. But as soon as we start observing clouds changing shape, familiar images and objects appear from them... At the same time, we rarely think about how this happens and what operations take place in our brain. In science, this phenomenon has received an appropriate definition - optical illusions of the eye. At such moments, we visually perceive one picture, but the brain protests and deciphers it differently. Let's get acquainted with the most popular visual illusions and try to explain them.

general description

Eye illusions have long been an object of curiosity for psychologists and artists. In a scientific definition, they are perceived as an inadequate, distorted perception of objects, an error, a delusion. In ancient times, the cause of illusion was considered incorrect operation human visual system. Today, optical illusion is a deeper concept, associated with brain processes that help us “decipher” and understand the surrounding reality. The principle of human vision is explained by the reconstruction of a three-dimensional image of visible objects on the retina. Thanks to this, you can determine their size, depth and distance, the principle of perspective (parallelism and perpendicularity of lines). The eyes read information, and the brain processes it.

The illusion of deception of the eyes can vary in several parameters (size, color, perspective). Let's try to explain them.

Depth and size

The simplest and most familiar human vision is a geometric illusion - a distortion of the perception of the size, length or depth of an object in reality. In reality, this phenomenon can be observed by looking at railway. Up close, the rails are parallel to each other, the sleepers are perpendicular to the rails. In perspective, the drawing changes: a slope or bend appears, the parallelism of the lines is lost. The further the road goes, the more difficult it is to determine the distance of any section of it.

This illusion for the eyes (with explanations, everything as it should be) was first talked about by the Italian psychologist Mario Ponzo in 1913. The habitual decrease in the size of an object with its distance is a stereotype for human vision. But there are deliberate distortions of these perspectives that destroy the holistic image of the subject. When a staircase maintains parallel lines throughout its entire length, it becomes unclear whether a person is going down or going up. In fact, the structure has a deliberate extension downwards or upwards.

In relation to depth, there is the concept of disparity - the different position of points on the retina of the left and right eyes. Thanks to this, the human eye perceives an object as concave or convex. The illusion of this phenomenon can be observed in 3D pictures, when three-dimensional images are created on flat objects (sheet of paper, asphalt, wall). Thanks to the correct arrangement of shapes, shadows and light, the picture is mistakenly perceived by the brain as real.

Color and contrast

One of the most important properties The human eye is the ability to distinguish colors. Depending on the illumination of objects, perception may vary. This is due to optical irradiation - the phenomenon of light “flowing” from brightly lit to dark areas of the image on the retina. This explains the loss of sensitivity to distinguish between red and orange flowers and its increase in relation to blue and violet at twilight. In this regard, optical illusions may occur.

Contrasts also play an important role. Sometimes a person mistakenly judges the color saturation of an object against a faded background. Conversely, bright contrast mutes the colors of nearby objects.

The illusion of color can also be observed in the shadows, where brightness and saturation also do not appear. There is the concept of “color shadow”. In nature, it can be observed when a fiery sunset turns houses and the sea red, which themselves have contrasting shades. This phenomenon can also be considered an illusion for the eyes.

Outlines

The next category is the illusion of perceiving contours and outlines of objects. In the scientific world, it is called the phenomenon of perceptual readiness. Sometimes what we see is not so, or has a double interpretation. Currently, in the visual arts there is a fashion for creating dual images. Different people they look at the same “encrypted” picture and read different symbols, silhouettes, and information in it. A prime example of this in psychology is the Rorschach blot test. According to experts, visual perception V in this case the same, but the answer in the form of interpretation depends on the characteristics of the person’s personality. When assessing the qualities, it is necessary to take into account the localization, level of form, content and originality/popularity of the reading of such illusions.

Changelings

This type of eye illusion is also popular in art. Its trick is that in one position of the image human brain reads one image, and in the opposite - another. The most famous shapeshifters are the old princess and the hare duck. In terms of perspective and color, there is no distortion here, but there is a perceptual readiness. But to make a difference, you should turn the picture over. A similar example in reality would be cloud watching. When the same shape from different positions (vertically, horizontally) can be associated with different objects.

Ames room

An example of a 3D eye illusion is the Ames Room, invented in 1946. It is designed in such a way that, when viewed from the front, it appears to be an ordinary room with parallel walls perpendicular to the ceiling and floor. In fact, this room is trapezoidal. The far wall in it is located so that the right corner is obtuse (closer), and the left corner is acute (further). The illusion is enhanced by the chess squares on the floor. The person in the right corner is visually perceived as a giant, and in the left - a dwarf. Of interest is the movement of a person around the room - a person rapidly growing or, conversely, decreasing.

Experts say that for such an illusion it is not necessary to have walls and a ceiling. A visible horizon, which only appears so relative to the corresponding background, is sufficient. The illusion of the Ames room is often used in films to create the special effect of a giant dwarf.

Moving illusions

Another type of illusion for the eyes is a dynamic picture, or autokinetic movement. This phenomenon occurs when, when examining a flat image, the figures on it begin to literally come to life. The effect is enhanced if a person alternately approaches/moves away from the picture, moves his gaze from right to left and vice versa. In this case, the distortion occurs due to a certain selection of colors, circular arrangement, irregularity or “vector” shapes.

"Tracking" paintings

Probably every person has at least once encountered the visual effect when a portrait or image on a poster literally watches him move around the room. The legendary “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci, “Dionysus” by Caravaggio, “Portrait of an Unknown Woman” by Kramskoy or ordinary portrait photographs are vivid examples of this phenomenon.

Despite the mass of mystical stories that surround this effect, there is nothing unusual about it. Scientists and psychologists, pondering how to create the “following eyes” illusion, came up with a simple formula.

• The model's face should look directly at the artist.
• The larger the canvas, the stronger the impression.
• The emotions on the model's face matter. An indifferent expression will not arouse curiosity or fear of persecution in the observer.

At correct location light and shadow, the portrait will acquire a three-dimensional projection, volume, and when moving it will seem that the eyes are following the person from the picture.