Perception – Real or Illusion?

​Do you trust your eyes to tell the truth? This post is about perception, and what your eyes tell your brain. Real or illusion – good luck deciding which you see!
​

Part 1 – A Little Magic, Please! This story really happened. Sorry, no pictures, but don’t worry! I’ve got words.

Meet Siegfried and Roy! Back in the 1990s they had the biggest show in Las Vegas. My husband and I saw them a year or two before the accident that ended their careers.
​
We lucked into front row seats. We were thrilled, and a little terrified. We kept looking at the tracks onstage and wondering how close the lions and tigers could get to us. 

---

But we were perfectly safe from the lions and tigers, but not from the elephant. Siegfried and Roy brought it onstage, did a few of the usual tricks that elephants do in circuses, and then . . . it disappeared.

​I watched the lights and mirrors, then turned my eyes back to the elephant. It was gone! How could that HUGE animal disappear so quickly?

My husband the engineer had the answer. He watched them walk the elephant offstage. He ignored those lights and mirrors, and he watched it leave.

It was a sleight of hand trick, but the real magic is in your perception, in how you see the world. Me, I followed the magician and his tricks. I’d like to think that I see the magic in something, the potential of what it could be.

My husband is logical, and he can stay focused, but he misses out on the magic. How about you? What do you perceive – magic or logic?
​ Source: Siegfried & Roy - Wikipedia

​

---

​Part 2 – What Do You See? – It depends on how you perceive the world. If you’re like me, I always see the white space first. If your eye went to the black area instead, you saw something else. So, what did you see?

I saw the vase first, that white space. But if I know something else is there, then I’ll look at the black. That’s when I finally found those two silhouettes. 

Picture Source: By Brocken Inaglory - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8341735

Gestalt psychologists say we perceive individual sensor information, like the white/black shapes, as one big whole. For me, that means I see the vase. Wikipedia didn’t explain what that means, but I bet my eye doctor could. They always ask me what color is dominant when I get my eyes checked. Now I wonder whether the important thing is whether the line’s horizontal or vertical, and not so much its color. 
​​

​What do you see when you look at my necklace? There are two possibilities, depending on whether you see empty space in the circle, or the line? Can you guess what I saw?

Yep, the white space, and the jack-o-lantern. At first I couldn’t figure out why anyone would put a pumpkin in the middle of a cross. Then someone told me what it’s supposed to be.

Do you see the other shape? I don’t unless I focus on the line down the middle of the circle. Did you see it first, or after I told you where to look? The line makes a dove, which makes better sense on a cross.
​
If you know Matthew 3:16, you know why. If not, here’s the NIV version of that verse . . . As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. Now, do you see the dove?

---

​It’s funny . . . when I turn it sideways, like this, I see the dove first. It makes me feel better as a Christian, now that I know it’s my perception that makes me see that darn pumpkin.

When the cross is vertical, I see the space, that jack-o-lantern. When it’s horizontal, I see the line, and that dove. What a relief!

Source: Optical illusion - Wikipedia

​

Part 3 – What Color Do You See? 
​

​
It depends on who’s answering. 70% of the people who voted on buzzfeed.com a few years ago said white and gold. The other 30% said blue and black. How could people like me get this wrong? Everyone knows the difference between blue and white, even preschoolers!
​
It’s a matter of perception. My source said cover the dress so you see only white, then you’ll get the real color – BLUE! It must be one of those things eye doctors understand.

Sources: Posted originally by wiked on Tumblr  
​
Color Illusions and Color Blind Tests (brainden.com)

---

​How about this one? It’s called a simultaneous contrast illusion, but which rectangle doesn’t change at all? The big one, or the one that’s long and narrow? One of them is really changing slowly from dark to light gray. The other one remains the same color. Which one is it?!

If you guessed the long narrow one, you’re RIGHT! The big rectangle starts out dark on the left, and gradually fades to the right. But the long narrow one – READY – it’s the same color all the way across. I’ll repeat . . . The whole narrow rectangle IS THE SAME COLOR! What’s the difference? It’s how you perceive the background around it.

​It makes sense when you know a little about combining colors. My nail lady and I love to do an accent nail. Some colors show up against the background. Some don’t. It depends on how close they are on the color spectrum. I have silver nails now, like the right side of that big rectangle. Patricia put white snowflakes on it. White shows up on silver! Why? Because the colors are different enough, but if we’ve used colors that are too similar, like pink and purple, they might fade together.

Source: Optical illusion - Wikipedia
​
Picture Source: By Dodek - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1529278
​

​And the finale . . . Sorry, this shirt isn’t an illusion. It represents a tie-dye yellow and gray one I almost bought. What stopped me? Whenever I looked at it, I saw maize and blue, Michigan colors, AKA that state up north. I absolutely couldn’t buy it!

Guess what! I wasn’t the only one who saw maize and blue. My friends at Casa Chic told me that a lot of people refused to buy this shirt for the same reason. Sometimes perception really is in the eye of the beholder!

---