Spiritual Forum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_illusion

Perception involves the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory information. Clear evidence that perception is influenced by our experience comes from the many demonstrations of perceptual set and context effects - our learned assumptions and beliefs --as well as by sensory input comes from the many demonstrations of perceptual set, a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another.

Through experience we also form schemas, or concepts, which organize and interpret unfamiliar information, a fact that helps explain why some of us "see" monsters, faces, and UFOs and other phenomena that others do not.

Selective attention means that at any moment our awareness focuses on only a limited aspect of all that we are capable of experiencing. For example, even if a stimulus figure can evoke more than one perception, we consciously experience only one at a time.

Human brain tends to group things in four types namely similarity, continuity, closure and proximity. We group things of similar color to picture a particular shape. Our brain is always in search of patterns. The brain tries to find some kind of continuity in whatever our eyes see. Closure occurs because our brain tries to construct views of familiar objects from whatever we look at. For example, if short lines spaced from each other are arranged circularly, our brain perceives it to be a circle. In the fourth type of grouping, which is proximity, the brain groups the objects that are laid closely together.

Gestalt psychologists described principles by which we organize our sensations into perceptions. They provided many compelling demonstrations of how, given a cluster of sensations, the human perceiver organizes them into a gestalt, a German word meaning a "form" or a "whole." They further demonstrated that the whole may differ from the sum of its parts. Clearly, our brains do more than merely register information about the world. We are always filtering sensory information and inferring perceptions in ways that make sense to us.

British philosopher John Locke maintained that we learn to perceive the world through our experiences of it. It's now clear that different aspects of perception depend more or less on nature's endowments and on the experiences that influence what we make of our sensations.

Lipps in his principle of mechanical aesthetic unity says that we give the form of a living being to every space and unconsciously consider some mechanical forces acting. But Wundt suggests that laws dealing with formation of the retinal image and the movement of the eye are accountable to optical illusions. Objects reflect the light that falls on them and the eye forms inverted images of the objects on the retina. The brain interprets the image and we perceive the object to be what it really is.

....“Allow the words to flow. They seem to arrive out of thin air, as you perceive them. This is what our subject is all about – perception – letting the words form in your mind. Mortals are endowed with responsiveness to the sixth sense, depending in measure on how much thought is given to the inner life, spirituality and eternity, but only to the degree one refuses to get bogged down in the outer material world with its worries and concerns.

“Over time, perception becomes a knowing as perception has an increasing influence over the faith of the individual. This is the perception that ‘something additional to the self’ exists within you, and this will become a personal conviction, which no one can take away. This knowingness is the surety, which evolves over time when more time is given to develop that sixth sense. It can even be applied to all areas in life

“At times mere belief systems become so strong and so solidly embedded in the human psyche, that there simply is no room to entertain different thoughts. The windows of the soul now become so clouded over, even shuttered and closed down. Therefore no Light is able to penetrate, and eternal life no longer remains a possibility.
“It needs to be remembered that truth is ever enlarging the more one gives room to perception and truly takes responsibility for one’s own thoughts, so insights can arise which alter the human psyche forever with an enlarged truth which leads towards a greater love for one another..” © The 11:11 Progress Group.

Anais Nin says, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are!" This is a fact, which makes itself evident in everyday life. We see different people having different interpretations of the same subject; we see different people think differently and more importantly, we see different people see differently! Does this puzzle you? Imagine the sun, rises in the East and sets in the West. Doesn't it appear to have traversed across the sky, when it has actually not? Mirrors in a room make the room appear larger than it is. This is due to reflection of light as perceived by our eyes. Human eye is actually a wonderful optical mechanism. Light falling on an object gets reflected to form an inverted image on the retina of the human eye. The brain interprets the image and we perceive the object. Actually illusion is the only reality, as whatever we see, we think real and not everything that we see is a reality! Illusions are a result of mistaken judgment or erroneous vision. The error in the way of seeing things results in optical illusions. It is the way we perceive things that matters. It is the way our eyes perceive and brain interprets, that affects our understanding of things around us.

How we "perceive" these things determines our reality yet at the same time "allowing" our perceptions to expand our "awareness" regarding what's "truly possible" for us enables us to tap into Actuality where possibility and potential is quite literally "infinite in nature."

The individual perceptions we hold regarding the "illusion of space time" determine the quality of our lives individually.

As one brilliant scientific mind discovered and understood many years ago...

"Time does not exist as we know it. Time Future, Past and Present all coexist simultaneously right now." - Albert Einstein

And that's a key point to grasp and understand. It's what we "know" that determines what we experience and it NEVER fails. Sometimes what "we know" is the very thing that keeps us from what we "truly desire" to experience.

The less you "believe" it does...the less it does plain and simple. And it "truly is" that simple. It's only a matter of individual choice. The choices being are you open, willing and receptive.

While looking at the animation above, pay attention to the moving layer of black dots while keeping your eyes fixed on the blue dot in the middle. When a pair of red dots is flashed on screen, how are they aligned? Now switch your focus to the spinning white layer. Do the red dots appear in the same place? Finally, look at the blue dot without focusing on either spinning layer and note the position of the red dots.

When paying attention to the black layer, the red dots should appear slanted to the left and when looking at the white layer they appear to be skewed to the right. But when the layers are ignored, the dots seem to be aligned vertically - which is in fact their true position in every case.

According to the researchers, the illusion is the strongest example to date for how attention can affect our perception of an object's location. By using an identical stimulus with different layers to pay heed to, it clearly demonstrates how an object in a fixed place can appear to move around. For the effect to occur, the objects must be presented very briefly, there must be motion around them and they should appear at the moment when the surrounding motion is reversed. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/05/best-illusions-fixed-object-moves-before-your-eyes.html

Also NASA Uses an Optical Illusion to see space … ;) http://news.softpedia.com/news/NASA-Uses-an-Optical-Illusion-to-See-in-Space-56133.shtml

references:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/causes-of-optical-illusions.html

http://courseweb.edteched.uottawa.ca/psy1200cf/Lecture_Topic/Perceptive.htm