50 Times People Had To Look Twice At Things To Realize What They Are

Call me crazy, but today on my way to work, I saw a trash bag that looked just like a bird. I gave it a second glimpse, only to realize my eyes were deceiving me, and that it was, in fact, nothing more and nothing less than a plastic bag.

Chances are most of us happen to have optical illusions now and then. They distort reality in such a way that we see objects, shapes, or things that are not entirely there. Usually it doesn’t last long, but it doesn’t make it any less realistic.

Kim Ransley, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney, explains that “In day-to-day life, the ability to distinguish objects helps us work out what is around us when parts of the scene are covered or lighting is poor.”

However, when it comes to the visual patterns that appear in random things and places, and occur purely by chance, these “can also trigger the system, causing us to see familiar objects in very strange places—such as the appearance of a face in a cloud.”

It turns out, this is all due to our ability to see, which involves the brain molding raw sensory data we get from the world around us into a more refined form. Kim explained that most of these refinements “are deliberate—they’re designed to help us survive.”

Other times, “certain patterns regularly trip our brains up” even if they have evolved to guess right most of the time. “That’s when we might see an optical illusion,” she concluded.