Why can things like optical illusions “trick” our brain, even when you know for a fact what the reality is? Why is “what your brain thinks” not equal to “what you know”?

Question

Why can things like optical illusions “trick” our brain, even when you know for a fact what the reality is? Why is “what your brain thinks” not equal to “what you know”?

In: 18

Answer 1

There’s a lot of stuff in our brain that is in no way under our conscious control.

Our brains also apparently use a lot of “hacks” to get the job done- evolution is a “good enough” system, not an intelligent designer. For example, there are blind spots in our eyes due to the way our retina is shaped, our brains just edit that out.

We can’t control how our optic system works. We can’t choose to ignore or change information moving from our eyes to our brains, so even when we “know” an optical illusion is impossible we don’t get to choose how our “hardware” processes the visual information.

Finding things that interact with our vision system in a weird way is how we invent new optical illusions