Ill-usions

I've always been interested and entertained by how our brain works, or more specifically how we use it to percieve things. There are of course physical pieces to the puzzle (eyes, ears, etc), but there are also the important ingredients of previous experience and memory. What we expect to see or hear sometimes (most of the time) influences what we think we do see or hear. The perennial examples of how to play on our perception are undoubtedly optical illusions.

Firstly, please check this out. This illusion is an interesting take on some older ideas. We've seen images that play on color before, but few that throw in actual, and not perceived, animation. The effect, in this case, is that of disappearing dots, and I do not doubt that it revolves around color theory and (I think) persistence of vision.


Here's another color-related favorite of mine. The brain here makes it difficult to ignore the words we are reading. I find it indicative of our evolved dependence on the written word. Think you can do it? Try moving quickly by the words; that seems to help.

Lastly, I'll throw out this one, one of my favorite examples of percieved animation: