Illusions Blog

I picked these 8 illusions for the activity: Adelson's Corrugated Plaid, Stereokinetic phenomenon, Scintillating Grid, Face in Blocks, Rotation changes the Interpretation, The Frankfurter Illusion, Shepard's "Turning the Tables", and Contrast Constancy.

From the tutorials, I was able to realize that there is often a lot more to a picture, image, or even something that seems to be a gob of nothing. The tutorials showed me that my mind percieves sometimes only the things it WANTS to percieve. It also showed me that sometimes my mind is surprised by illusions I wasn't ready to see because they aren't "set," common, or expected.

In some of the tutorials, I tried to figure out what I was supposed to learn before reading the write up on each one. Sometimes I could figure it out, but most times I couldn't. This surprised me. I expected that I would be able to see whatever I was "supposed" to see without reading the write ups, but it wasn't until I read that I saw Abraham Lincoln's "face in blocks!" I was also surprised in the corrugated plaid tutorial when the dots were turning colors as I looked at and away from them. I thought my mind was playing tricks on my or that my eyes were going weird until I read the tutorial and learned that that was the illusion part of it.

I think these tutorials can teach us something about how we percieve the world. Not everything in life is an optical illusion or has to be stared at, but these tutorials demonstrate that there really is more to life than only the things we want or choose to see. In some of the tutorials I almost "ignored" the illusion until what I was supposed to see was spelled out for me! It's the same way in life. It's easy to not percieve things until they're placed right under your nose.

Experiences in which I fail to sense or percieve things happen every day. A perfect example could be not sensing or percieving what someone is trying to get across to me without verbalizing. Someone may be sending oodles of body language messages, and I may fail to notice completely. I think this happens to many of us, and it all deals with whether our mind is in tune to percieve our surroundings.