What Are Optical Illusions

Sometimes your eyes see things that your brain doesn’t understand. These are optical illusions – pictures that play tricks on your eyes and confuse your brain. Besides being fun, optical illusions help us to better understand vision and demonstrate how closely our eyes and brain work together.

Scientists have studied optical illusions and they still don’t completely understand or agree about how they work. However, many scientists believe that some optical illusions are caused when the information taken in by our eyes conflicts with how our brain interprets that information. The brain can’t make sense of what the eyes are seeing, so it falls back on its previous experience. It turns the unfamiliar into something familiar.