Your Lyin' Eyes

Seeing is believing. Or is it?

Can you really believe what you see? It depends. Our minds do such a great job of trying to make sense of our visual inputs, and we’re always susceptible to being tricked.

Optical illusions are a great way to illustrate this phenomenon:

Doesn’t it look like seven rectangles are rotating around in a circle? Look a little closer (or cheat by putting your mouse or finger over one of the “rectangles” so you can see what’s going on.

These aren’t really rectangles at all, except for the shape on the left. Our mind tells us they must be rectangles since we see that one rectangle right there, and rectangles look like parallelograms when they’re rotating around in a circle like that. Coupled with the appearance of up/down columns in the back (those also aren’t really moving!), the rectangles seem to rotate.

Magicians have used concepts like these for millennia. They’ve long understood that our mind wants for certain things to be there, and we’ll work desperately t…