Nautilus

How Japanese Floating Illusions Reverse-Engineer What We See

The Arais do not merely dissect illusions, but can generate them, taking an image that looks boringly normal and making subtle changes, to color and contrast, to fool our brains.

f you don’t know how something works, break it. Science is built on creative destruction: Much of what neuroscientists know of the brain, they know from what gets lost during brain injuries. Under happier circumstances, they glimpse the functioning of visual perception from how created by Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University exploit our brain’s tendency to see all angles as right angles.

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