Monday, August 20, 2007

Visual illusions

The last few times I talked to people about my research, I brought up visual illusions. Although only peripherally related to the experiments I perform, I find them fascinating; they tell us a great deal about how we process visual images by exposing the moments when our eyes and brains mess up.

To celebrate the imperfections in our neural wiring, here are a few links to some illusions online:
Leaning Tower Illusion (plenty others to be found on that site as well)
Thatcher Illusion
Hollow mask illusion
Shepard’s “Terror Subterra”
A group of illusions that cover most of the basics and then some

Also, I read this interesting blog post on some of the philosophy behind The Matrix, which ended up including a bit on visual illusions, Rene Descartes, and how we should approach anything we learn through our flawed senses with a healthy dose of skepticism.

1 comment:

Geoffrey said...

Screw Descartes. Nietzsche is the man :)