

Their minds have to work overtime to become more flexible. Apart from being both endlessly fascinating and awe-inspiring visually, these illusions also force viewers to go outside their comfort zones, challenge the nature of perception, and think creatively. When you look at an optical illusion, your brain tries to fool your eyes and what you expect to find on the page isn't what's there. What's real? What's not? Reality is strange-and seeing isn't believing. When your brain assesses the same color against the lighter background on the right, it makes the bar a darker gray.Print Go!Games Optical Illusions: 248 Entertain Your Brain Puzzles When the left side of the bar is viewed in a dim, or darker, situation (the dark gray background), your brain naturally lightens it up. How does it work? Well, it’s called a “simultaneous contrast illusion.” Your brain fills in the information it believes is missing–that is, the lighting. The gray bar is actually one consistent color throughout. Or does it? Cover everything but the bar, and you’ll see that instead of moving from a lighter shade of gray to a darker one as you move towards the right. This picture obviously shows a graded gray bar on a graded gray background. Most of the time, shadows are reliable, but in the world of optical illusions they aren’t! Shades of Gray: The Gradient Illusion In this illusion, we find out how much we rely on other information, like shadows, to accomplish this.


Then we are forced to not just identify the object itself, but to also decide where that object is in time and space. Our eyes view an object and send information through the optic nerve to the brain for identification. This illusion evidences how we rely on shadows to give us information about what we see. Does your brain get fooled into thinking that the ball has moved? Is the ball higher? Does it have the appearance of flying through the air, once the shadow is separated from the object? What about when the shadow bounces? Does your brain think the basketball bounces too?

Now watch what happens when the shadow is added to the basketball. It actually keeps the same course from the bottom left side of the screen to the top right side.
