Is Seeing Really Believing?

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Researchers still do not know exactly how the eyes and brain interact to give us the full color world we accept as reality, but they are getting closer. There is recent evidence to suggest that in some cases what we think is real may only be a construct of the way our brain interprets or guesses at the signals our eyes feed it.

From Pliny the Elder’s fabled tromp-l’oeil contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, to DaVinci, Picasso, Dali and Vasarely, artists have always led the way in the exploration of the many ways our brains can be fooled by optical illusions, and scientists have followed up on these discoveries in an attempt to find out why. The Fall 2013 special edition of Scientific American Mind magazine features 187 spectacular optical illusions, many of them created by artists, that will challenge your comfortable notions of what is real and what is imagined. Along the way, the authors explain the many complex mechanisms by which we read and misread the world around us.

The photo o…