Table of Contents

• Triangle
• Seal
• Not Reading
• Famous People

There is a hole in each of your eyes. Where the optic nerve leaves the eye for the brain, there isn’t a single light receptor. You have never seen it: every second, the brain paints over it with whatever is around.

The body sends signals, and the mind builds a picture from them. Let’s test how reliable that picture is.

Triangle

Let’s start with a simple example.

*Poof*, the magic is gone. The corners were doing all the work. Knock them out of line, and the illusion falls apart.

But the main point is this — there was no triangle at all. The mind is just playing tricks on us.

Seal

Here is another strange animal. You see a seal or a donkey — never both at once. The mind picks one way of seeing it.

Not Reading

What if I told you that you don’t even read?

Wait, what? Yep. You just scan the lines and the brain fills in the words.

This text went around the internet in 2003, credited to a study at Cambridge University. There was no such study: Cambridge later made a point of explaining that nothing like it had ever been published there. And you read it anyway.

And it’s easier to read when you aren’t even trying — something in your body is doing it for you.

Famous People

And here is my personal favorite — what happens when someone comes to talk to you while you are staring at your phone screen.

This illusion was discovered by accident. A student in Australia was preparing photos of faces for a different experiment, lined them up so the eyes matched, and flipped through them. The faces started turning into monsters.

We don’t even see colors as they really are — the brain keeps filling in the picture. And taste doesn’t exist at all. Taste is the reaction that happens when something lands on a human taste receptor.

The world is not what it is. The body keeps adjusting it.

How did it come to this? Let’s see how we got here.