Here is a particularly powerful optical illusion which demonstrates that what we see or don’t see isn’t always what is or isn’t there.

If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink. If you stare at the black + in the center, the moving dot turns to green. Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating if you’re lucky! It’s amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don’t disappear. This should be proof enough, we don’t always see what we think we see.

This is based upon colors and movement and how the brain organizes response perceptions but it clearly demonstrates that something is going on.

We positively hallucinate (see something that isn’t there, for instance imagine that person walking toward us is our friend when we discover it isn’t when we get close but we were certain . . . once in Taipei, I swore I could see a huge “Don’t Panic” advertisement for the film Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the side of Taipei 101 but when we got closer it was just a watch advert but I saw it very very clearly, of course, I was really jazzed to see that movie) and negatively hallucinate (don’t see something that is there like when you are looking for your keys and you tear the house up to find them but they end up being somewhere in plain sight that you could have sworn you looked at several times).

All the best,
Brian