How your eyes deceive you

Do these look like steps? They're actually flat floor tiles in Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon, Vietnam. The study found that your brain can be tricked into these types of illusions while it scrambles to make sense of the visual signals its receiving. Image: tunart/iStockphoto People rely on their eyes for most things they do – yet the information provided by our visual sensing system is often distorted, unreliable and subject to illusion.Researchers at The Vision Centre, Australia, are throwing new light on the tricks the brain plays on its owner as it struggles to make sense of the visual and other sensory signals it constantly receives.“We tend to regard what we see as ‘the real world’,” says Dr Isabelle Mareschal, a researcher with the Vision centre and University of Sydney. “In fact a lot of it is distortion, and it is occurring in the early processing of the brain, before consciousness...

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