Illusions for the eyes. Optical illusion (14 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 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 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.

Chessboard

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.

Illusion with color

The next optical illusion is the Cafe Wall Illusion.

Cafe wall

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.

Illusion with arrows

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

Illusion with perspective

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.

Bouquet of violets and Napoleon's face

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 double image picture called “My Wife and Mother-in-Law.”

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.

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.

Illusion with a woman's face

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

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

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?

Cube illusion

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.

How often do you think this happens in real life?

Optical illusion - unreliable visual perception any picture: incorrect assessment of the length of segments, the color of the visible object, the size of the angles, etc.

The reasons for such errors lie in the peculiarities of the physiology of our vision, as well as in the psychology of perception. Sometimes illusions can lead to completely wrong quantitative estimates specific geometric quantities.

Even looking carefully at the “optical illusion” picture, in 25 percent or more of cases you can make a mistake if you do not check your visual assessments with a ruler.

Pictures of optical illusion: size

So, for example, let's look at the following figure.

Pictures of optical illusion: circle size

Which of the circles located in the middle is larger?

Correct answer: the circles are the same.

Pictures of optical illusion: proportions

Which of the two people is taller: the dwarf in the foreground or the person walking behind everyone?

Correct answer: they are the same height.

Pictures of optical illusion: length

The figure shows two segments. Which one is longer?

Correct answer: they are the same.

Pictures of optical illusion: pareidolia

One type of visual illusion is pareidolia. Pareidolia is an illusory perception of a specific object.

Unlike illusions of perception of length, depth, dual images, pictures with images that are specially created in order to provoke the occurrence of illusions, pareidolia can arise on their own when viewing the most ordinary objects. So, for example, sometimes when looking at a pattern on wallpaper or a carpet, clouds, spots and cracks on the ceiling, you can see fantastic changing landscapes, unusual animals, people’s faces, etc.

The basis of various illusory images can be the details of a real-life drawing. The first to describe similar phenomenon, there were Jaspers and Kalbaumi (Jaspers K., 1913, Kahlbaum K., 1866;). Many pareidolic illusions can arise when perceiving well-known images. In this case, similar illusions can occur simultaneously in several people.

So, for example, in the following picture, which shows the building of the Center international trade on fire. Many people can see the scary face of the devil on it.

The image of the devil can be seen in the next picture - the devil in the smoke

In the following picture you can easily distinguish a face on Mars (NASA, 1976). The play of shadow and light has given rise to many theories about ancient Martian civilizations. Interestingly, late photographs of this area of Mars do not show a face.

And here you can see a dog.

Pictures of optical illusion: color perception

Looking at the drawing, you can observe the illusion of color perception.

In fact, the circles on different squares are the same shade of gray.

Looking at the following picture, answer the question: are the chess squares on which points A and B are the same or different colors?

It's hard to believe, but yes! Don't believe me? Photoshop will prove it to you.

How many colors are you drawing in the following picture?

There are only 3 colors - white, green and pink. You might think there are 2 shades of pink, but that's actually not the case.

What do these waves look like to you?

Are the brown wave stripes colored? But no! It's just an illusion.

Look at the following picture and say the color of each word.

Why is this so difficult? The fact is that one part of the brain is trying to read the word, while the other perceives the color.

Pictures of optical illusion: elusive objects

Looking at the following image, look at black dot. After some time, the colored spots should go away.

Do you see the gray diagonal stripes?

If you look at the center point for a while, the stripes will disappear.

Pictures of optical illusion: shapeshifter

Another view visual illusion- changeling. The fact is that the image of the object itself depends on the direction of your gaze. So, one of these optical illusions is the “duck hare.” This image can be interpreted as both an image of a hare and an image of a duck.

Take a closer look, what do you see in the next picture?

What do you see in this picture: a musician or a girl’s face?

Strange, it's actually a book.

A few more pictures: optical illusion

If you look at the black color of this lamp for a long time, and then look at white sheet paper, then this lamp will be visible there too.

Look at the dot, and then move away a little and move closer to the monitor. The circles will spin in different directions.

That. the features of optical perception are complex. Sometimes you shouldn’t believe your own eyes...

Snakes crawl in different directions.

Aftereffect illusion

After throughout long period continuously look at the image, for some time then there will be some impact on vision. For example, prolonged contemplation of a spiral leads to the fact that all objects around will rotate for 5-10 seconds.

Shadow figure illusion

This is a common type of erroneous perception when a person guesses a figure in the shadows with peripheral vision.

Irradiation

This visual illusion, leading to distortion of the size of an object placed on a background of contrasting color.

Phosphene phenomenon

This is the appearance of unclear dots of different shades in front of closed eyes.

Depth perception

This is an optical illusion, implying two options for perceiving the depth and volume of an object. Looking at the image, a person does not understand whether an object is concave or convex.

Optical illusions: video

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 generated 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 the point in the center black and white image within 15 seconds, the picture takes on color.

Impossible elephant

Drawing by Roger Shepard.

Illusion of color

Without looking away, 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

Cells chessboard

Are squares A and B of the chessboard different colors? The Color Perception Illusion, published by MIT professor 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!

Optical illusions are nothing more than an optical illusion of our brain. After all, when we look at a picture, our eye sees one thing, but the brain begins to protest and claim that this is not at all what it is. So it turns out that illusions are created by our mind, which begins to analyze the color, the position of the light source, the location of edges or corners, etc. Thanks to this, the correction of visual images occurs.
Be careful! Some illusions can cause tearing, headaches and disorientation in space.

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.

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.

Look at the cross in the center. Peripheral vision turns beautiful faces into monsters.

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

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

Which direction does the wheel spin?

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.

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

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

The birth of animation. Animated images by overlaying a grid of black parallel lines on the finished drawing. Before our eyes, static objects begin to move.

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

At one time, this genre of graphics became so widespread that it even received its own name - impossibilism. Each of these figures seems quite real on paper, but simply cannot exist in the physical world.

Impossible trident

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

Another shining example- impossible Penrose triangle.

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

And also “The Impossible Elephant” by Roger Shepard.

Ames room

Issues of optical illusions interested Adelbert Ames Jr. early childhood. After becoming an ophthalmologist, he continued his research into depth perception, which resulted in the famous Ames Room.

How does the Ames room work?

In a nutshell, the effect of Ames's room can be conveyed as follows: it seems that in the left and right corners of its back wall there are two people - a dwarf and a giant. Of course, this is an optical trick, and in fact these people are quite normal in height. In reality, the room has an elongated trapezoidal shape, but due to the false perspective it appears rectangular to us. The left corner is farther away from the visitors' view than the right, and therefore the person standing there seems so small.

Movement Illusions

This category of optical tricks is of greatest interest to psychologists. Most of them are based on the subtleties of color combinations, the brightness of objects and their repetition. All these tricks mislead our peripheral vision, as a result of which the perception mechanism gets confused, the retina captures the image intermittently, spasmodically, and the brain activates the areas of the cortex responsible for recognizing movement.

floating star

It's hard to believe that this picture is not an animated GIF, but an ordinary optical illusion. The drawing was created by Japanese artist Kaya Nao in 2012. A pronounced illusion of movement is achieved thanks to the opposite direction of the patterns in the center and along the edges.

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

The most numerous and fun genre of illusion drawings is based on changing the direction of looking at a graphic object. The simplest inverted drawings just need to be rotated 180 or 90 degrees.

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

One of the most popular dual images was published in 1915 in the cartoon magazine Puck. The caption to the drawing read: “My wife and mother-in-law.”

Old people/Mexicans

Elderly married couple or Mexicans singing with a guitar? Most people see old people first, and only then their eyebrows turn into sombreros and their eyes into faces. The authorship belongs to the Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo, who created many illusion pictures of a similar nature.

Lovers/dolphins

Surprisingly, the interpretation of this psychological illusion depends on the person’s age. As a rule, children see dolphins frolicking in the water - their brains, not yet familiar with sexual relationships and their symbols, simply do not isolate two lovers in this composition. Older people, on the contrary, see the couple first, and only then the 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

Alas, human eye imperfect, and in our assessments of what we see we (without noticing it ourselves) often rely on the color environment and brightness of the background of the object. This leads to some very interesting optical illusions.

Gray squares

Optical illusions of colors are one of the most popular types of optical illusion. Yes, squares A and B are painted the same color.

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

There are only three colors in this photo: pink, orange and green. Don't believe me? This is what you get when you replace pink and orange with black.

Is the dress white and gold or blue and black?

However, illusions based on color perception are not uncommon. Take, for example, the white-gold or black-and-blue dress that conquered the Internet in 2015. What color was this mysterious dress really, and why? different people Did you perceive it differently?

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 background and decided that the dress was in the shadows, which means white 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 a 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.