Optical Illusions Show How We See

"The brain isn't evolved to see the world the way it is, instead we see the world how it's useful to see it".  This quote is taken out of the Ted Talk that was presented by Beau Lotto. Beau Lotto explains how the light that falls onto our eyes, sensory information,  is meaningless. That information can mean many things, but what matters is what we do with the information that we receive. The brain is evolved to find patterns and to find relationships in information and associating that information to a behavioral meaning. I was very interested to learn about the optical illusions that we discussed in class, and why there are certain things that we can't actually see. I looked further into it and saw some other optical illusions, and I came across the video (the link is at the bottom of this post). Here are some of the optical illusions he puzzles the audiences' vision with:

This illusion is of a desert on the bottom that is exactly the same only flipped over. The top is divided between the colors green and red.The center dot between the green and red is looked at for about 30 seconds without looking at anything else. Then when one looks at the center dot on the bottom with the desert, it does not look the same anymore. Beau explains how our brain was trained to see the left side as still under the color green light  and the right side as still under the color red light. He describes it as our "new normal".

Beau explains how the two squares in the center of both rectangles are actually the same color. We see the two squares a different color, not only because of the surrounding rectangle colors, but also because of our learned behavior in the past. We associate objects in dark surroundings to be in shadow, causing the square in the darker rectangle to look lighter. It's the law of physics.

Beau made this optical illusion himself a few years back. The top brown square on top of the cube is actually the same color as the orange square on the side of the cube. This optical illusion is better explained in the Ted Talk video by Beau. I found all these illusions very interesting. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see?language=en#t-463412