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A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There
Perception does not take place in the eyes
Although most participants experience an illusory effect during magic tricks, the eyes are not tricked. The conscious perception has been fooled by the illusion, but your eyes have not.
Lots of neural calculations are required before we can experience the world. Neural signals start in the retina, then it passes through different neural centers to the visual cortex and higher cortical areas, and eventually build a mental representation of the outside world. It takes about a tenth of a second for the light registered by the retina to become a visual perception. The neural delay means we perceive things at least a tenth of a second after they happened.
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"Pareidolia"
A team of neuroscientists believes there might be a meaningful link between creativity and seeing faces in clouds.
The scientific term for seeing familiar objects in random images, abstract things, or patterns is 'pareidolia.' Pareidolia has been reported in sounds too.
Studying involuntary imagination
At first, pareidolia (seeing shapes in clouds and in other inanimate objects) was seen negatively rather than a sign of creativity. It was even considered to be a symptom of psychosis or dementia.
In 1895, French psychologist Alfred Binet - known for his work on IQ tests - suggested that inkblots could be used in psychological research to study differences in involuntary imagination. This idea was further developed, resulting in inkblots to investigate people's personality and assess their psychological state.
Imagination is a sign of creativity
The creative aspect of pareidolia became known in the 19th century with the practice of 'klecksography' - the art of making images from inkblots.
Writer Victor Hugo experimented with folded papers and stains by holding his quill upside down to use the feather-end as a brush. Another practitioner of klecksography, German poet Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner, published Kleksographien (1890), a collection of inkblot art with accompanying short poems about the objects that can be noticed in the images.
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What influences our perception
- What we pay attention to and context
- Expectations and stereotypes
- Motivation. We tend to see what we want to see.
Motivated perception
It is the idea that we see what we want to see.
It’s similar to another concept — motivated reasoning, where we come to conclusions we’re predisposed to believe in.
Naive realism
It is the feeling that our perception of the world reflects the truth.
Of all our senses, we tend to trust our eyes the most. And we believe that the way we see the world is the way that the world really is.
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A preference for circles
Over the years, research has shown that individuals tend not only to prefer contoured lines over straight ones but also to associate more joyful feelings with the first ones.
Furthermore, a recent study has proven that people's preference for curved real objects has not changed a bit. We tend, it seems, to identify angular shapes with fear, aversion, and dislike, while circles bring to our mind feels like safety and peacefulness.
Favoring the round-shaped items
According to research in the field, people have the tendency to associate happiness with circles and anger with triangles.
This seems to find its meaning in individuals' attraction to the roundness of a child's face, as, involuntarily, we associate innocence and honesty to round-shaped items.
The attraction of the circle
Taking into account that our own eyes function based on the existence of spheres, such as the iris or the pupil, there is no wonder that we all are, as individuals, prone to choose circular lines over straight ones.