Optical illusions are not merely tricks or viral brain teasers, they reveal the curious disconnect between what we see and what our brain interprets. A flat drawing might come across as ...

Optical illusions occur naturally in different habitats and conditions across the world. Cloud formations can sometimes make it seem like there's an ocean or a UFO in the sky. Whether it is salt flats ...

Optical illusions like the one at the top of the page may not actually be bright, but our brains — and now it seems our eyes — think they are. This radial sunburst illusion is known as the Asahi ...

How optical illusions work has been long-debated among scientists and philosophers, who wonder whether these illusions stem from neural processing in the eye or involve higher-level cognitive ...

Illusions go viral: From Reddit’s hidden-number spirals to the legendary duck-rabbit, optical illusions keep sparking debates and fascination online by revealing how context shapes what we see.

This brain-frazzling optical illusion is enough to put your head into a spin. The purple-and-yellow image looks as though it’s both three-dimensional and moving but is in fact stationary and flat.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it’s actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece ...

Allen Institute researcher Jerome Lecoq points to one of the diagrams that was used in a study focusing on how the brain interprets optical illusions. (Allen Institute Photo / Erik Dinnel) Our brains ...

Everyone loves an optical illusion — even if they leave us completely stumped — and they're all around us in the natural world. From an underwater waterfall in the Indian Ocean to a surrealist scene ...