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How Optical Illusions Work

Stuff You Should Know

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The Illusion of Motion

The brain is being hit with all this visual information that just totally doesn't make sense, it would never happen in nature except maybe in motion. That the cicods actually each time your eye makes this tiny movement, it refreshes this overwhelming overload of information onto the brain which creates the sensation of movement. The trick to those is you focus on the black or the white and you see whichever one appears to be in the foreground because what your brain is doing is saying, I need a foreground and I need a background and then I've got something to work with. It's the same thing too with contourless figures where is it a wine goblet or is it two people's

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