ScottLee.Name

Most of the time when you are learning about the concept of optical illusions, many books and websites present it by simply showing you a bunch of different actual optical illusions, then saying “your brain is not very good at perceiving.” In actuality, your brain has an incredible ability to adapt, calculate, and indeed perceive various different objects. Matthew MacDonald, in his book Your Brain: The Missing Manual explains part of the reason why most of perception is actually done through early calculations.

While many people often rate their vision on the basis of how clear it appears to be, MacDonald explains that only a small portion of your eye is actually able to perceive imagery in fine detail. The portion of your eye that is able to do this is called the fovea. When one is highly intoxicated off of alcohol, the other areas of the eye that put together a fully detailed image slow down and you’re left with one sharp point surrounded by a lot of blurriness. These areas are called saccades. Tons of small, automatic movements by the eye actually fill in the remaining visual information that the brain then perceives.

Tell that one to the creationists who use the eye as their primary argument; the eye is far from perfect, and so is your perception. Still, it should also be dually noted by these facts that your brain is an incredibly fast processing computer. Much of the information that we take in is processed in a way that goes beyond conscious awareness. MacDonald gives the example that if you haphazardly arrange all of the furniture in your living room to be strewn about recklessly, you’ll spend the first several hours in the room stumbling over furniture and clumsily moving through the room. The next few hours will be spent effortlessly gliding around that environment.

Your brain is able to adapt to every single stimulus it receives in the environment based on the analyzing the information it receives. It might be said that in terms of being a visually based predator, humans fall short. What likely got us through the evolutionary turnpike was the power of human cognition, not the power of human perception. For some, this is a let down, but for others it is an empowering idea: the mechanisms that determine your perception are solidly in place, while cognition can continuously be expanded, grown, and improved.

So, we know that with optical illusions the brain can see motion from static images, see different sizes between two identically sized figures, see images from relative other objects that are not really there, and so on. In terms of understanding these perceptive phenomena in the scope of how it relates to the whole of cognitive psychology, many people would point to its direct use in practicality. It can be argued that not many breakthroughs have been made based off of the findings of optical illusions, but they can be fun to look at and experience. Others would argue that optical illusions and their existence can be used to figure out previously unknown things about the brain and perception.

My opinion of optical illusions somehow pointing to flaws in perception actually turns out to be untrue. Rather, I feel optical illusions show us how correct perception, or at least cognition, often is at explaining and interpreting different environmental aspects of the real world.