Optical Illusion Breakthrough: Brain Makes 'What's Next' Images

"Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered"
LiveScience (June 2, 2008)

"Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.

"And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.

"Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world."

The sort of prediction that our brains do isn't psychic. it's more like weather forecasting: except our brains do it better.

This article describes what looks like an exciting development in understanding how our brains work. Changizi's work organizes 50 kinds of illusions into 28 categories, and explains how variables will affect the illusion

"Changizi says that finding a theory that works for so many different classes of illusions is 'a theorist's dream.'

"Most other ideas put forth to explain illusions have explained one or just a few types, he said. The theory is 'a big new player in the debate about the origins of illusions,' Changizi told LiveScience. 'All I'm hoping for is that it becomes a giant gorilla on the block that can take some punches.' "