Don’t trust your eyes: how do optical illusions work? Examples included

When you don’t focus on the picture directly, the image moves.

It occurs outside the point of focus, that’s why it lacks details. However, peripheral vision has important functions. It easily recognizes and identifies well-known structures and forms with no need to focus on them. While looking at some optical illusions, some details are left out.

Cover your left eye and look at the left cross. Move towards the screen, the dot disappears and vice versa.

This is the spot in the eye where your nerves and blood vessels connect to your eye. There are no cells to detect light on the optic disc. Some process in our brains interpolates the blind spot based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye. There are some kinds of optical illusions that must be looked at with only one eye, thus some details disappear.

Our brain unconsciously constructs a cyan square above blue circles.

Our brains rely on our experience and memory, it can make some assumptions. That’s why we can understand scrambled words as our brains restore them.

In simple terms, optical illusions work on the principles of light and its interpretation by the eyes. By the way, different people’s brains interpret illusions differently. Take a look at the best optical illusions below, show them to your friends and compare what you see.