Ilusiones Opticas

• August 28, 2023

• Optical Illusions
• 1185 Visits

 Optical illusions.

Surely you have received more than one e-mail or visited web pages with still images that seem to be in motion, or silhouettes that when you look away are “recorded” in your vision. These images that try to fool our eyes are called optical illusions.

Many times our eyes give us the correct information and it is the brain that does not make a correct interpretation. It is also possible that the data is interpreted well, but the image is "impossible" for us, and it is not possible to make a mental representation of it.

 

What is an optical illusion?

An optical illusion is an image that fools the visual system, from the eye to the brain, and leads it to perceive reality in a distorted way.

Optical illusions can happen naturally or be created by specific visual effects. This is the result of the analysis of the information received from the visual system. This can cause an object that is not present to be perceived, giving a distorted image of reality.

The human visual system has a tendency to compensate for slow variations in brightness to perceive tones and colors in correspondence with its surroundings.

 

Why do optical illusions occur?

They occur when several shapes are presented in a single image and our brain comes into conflict.

The senses filter information from the outside so that it is then processed and modified in the brain.

For example, diagonal lines create an illusion of perspective, thus our brain manages to orient itself in three-dimensional space.

We do not yet fully understand the process by which the brain combines all information from perceptions of color, shape, movement, and texture to generate a cohesive interpretation.

But we know that the brain does not have enough capacity to handle all the information we receive through sight, so the mind is forced to take a shortcut, choosing the interpretation that seems most logical, for this reason our eyes can deceive us.

 

Types of optical illusions.

Optical illusions can be divided into two large groups: physiological optical illusions and cognitive optical illusions.

 

Physiological Optical Illusions.

An example of this type of optical illusion are the so-called afterimages. These are the images that remain imprinted in our eyes after observing a very luminous object, or the adaptive stimulus in the face of highly contrasted changing patterns, or ultimately, as a consequence of an excess of visual stimulus (brightness, movement, color, blinking, etc.)

This is explained because the stimuli have individual neural pathways for the first phases of the visual process, and repeatedly stimulating some of these paths causes confusion in the visual mechanism.

 

Cognitive optical illusions. 

This type of optical illusions can be made clear through various experiments that are dedicated to attacking a certain vulnerability of vision. An example are the figures that, when observed, appear somewhat different than what they really represent.

Cognitive illusions are divided into:

• Illusions of ambiguity: these are figures that present two non-simultaneous perception alternatives.
• Distortion illusions: they are the errors of perception of the size, length, curvature, angles or any geometric property.
• The paradoxical illusions: they present impossible objects.
• Fictional illusions (hallucinations): images are perceived that do not really exist. Hallucinations are usually the consequence of states of mental alteration.  

 

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