Whats an illusion?

An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and
interprets sensory stimulation. Though illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most
people. Illusions may occur with any of the human senses, but visual illusions (optical illusions),
are the most well-known and understood.

The emphasis (special importance) on visual

illusions occurs because vision often
dominates the other senses. For example,
individuals watching a ventriloquist (a person
who can speak or utter sounds so that they
seem to come from somewhere else.) will
perceive the voice is coming from the dummy
since they are able to see the dummy mouth

the words.

How does your brain process an illusion?

Different visual illusions are caused at different levels of the visual system.

The "blind spot" illusion which makes an image disappear when one eye is closed, for example,
occurs due to two levels. First, at the retinal level, you actually do have a physical blind spot
where the ganglia (a structure containing a number of nerve cell bodies) feed their outputs from
the retina (a layer at the back of the eyeball containing cells that are sensitive to light and that
trigger nerve impulses that pass via the optic nerve to the brain) into the optic nerve.

Hence (as a consequence) , there are no photoreceptors (a structure in a living organism,

especially a sensory cell or sense organ) in that region of your retina, and so you receive no
visual input in that region of your vision.

The brain, however, has several "filling-in" mechanisms to account for your two blind spots.
These occur in higher-level brain structures. One is to use the input from your opposite eye to
replace the blind spot. A second is to fill in the blind spot with the pattern or colors surround it
(this is why when the image disappears in the illusion you see it filled in as the color of the
paper).

The barber pole illusion is caused due to you only having certain types of image processing cells
in visual cortex (simple, complex). Other illusions depend on the color opponency which occurs
since photoreceptor (a structure in a living organism, especially a sensory cell or sense organ)
wavelengths overlap to some degree.

Some illusions even occur at very high-level processing stages, requiring that we see "inside"
and "outside" corners of buildings in our everyday lives!