I’ve always enjoyed optical illusions. That and magic — maybe I secretly like being tricked.
Here’s my favourite optical illusion at the moment.
You see before you a chessboard, with a cylinder casting a shadow upon it.
There is a square marked ‘A’ and a square marked ‘B’. Believe it or not, squares A and B are the exact same shade of grey. Don’t believe it? Fine, be that way. Proof is offered at the artist’s page, along with some other great illusions in Flash.
Don’t blame your brain for leading you astray. It’s doing a fine job. Our brains aren’t designed to show us things as they are. They’re pattern extractors. They combine the data we get into meaningful patterns that help us group those nearby random shapes into the image of an oncoming truck — thereby ensuring our survival.
In language, that means a child can extract the syntatcic patterns from grown-up speech and ingore all the ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ that aren’t all that important. It also allowed you to read right through those two spelling mistakes I made in the last sentence. You knew what I meant.
Unfortunately, these little funny bits in our reasoning mean that it’s hard for us to learn things like statistics and logic — it’s not intuitive. We also get swayed by fallacies. Fortunately we can learn these things with a bit of effort.
5 July 2006 at 10:32 pm
That is an extraordinary illusion. I have seen similar illusions but I think that is the most impressive. There is also that bit of text where the letters in each word are jumbled up apart from the first and last and one can still read it – do you know the one I mean?
6 July 2006 at 1:16 am
Yeah, that email thing that wans’t rlaley form Cmarbdige Usvinteiry.
The weird thing about the Checkerboard Shadow illusion is that, unlike many illusions, once you know about it, the illusion persists.
I show this to people and they say “What, you mean the little letters are the same colour?” No, the squares. There’s shock and disbelief. How could my senses lie to me?
And yet there it is.