Train your brain to see through visual fantasies

Optical fantasies may make you feel like a fool, but you may be able to train your brain to resist your brain.

“People in the general population are very likely trained to unravel illusions and have the ability to perceive the world more objectively,” he says. Radoslaw Wincza At Lancaster University, UK.

Wincza and his colleagues recruited 44 radiologists with an average age of 36. He spent over a decade finding small details such as fractures from a medical scan. They also saw 107 college students, an average of 23 years old, studying medicine and psychology.

Each participant displayed four fantasies one at a time on the screen. With each illusion, participants had to look at size or length size or length shape or line pairs and choose larger or longer ones.

In the three illusions, other objects made larger shapes or longer lines smaller and shorter lines. The team found that radiologists were less susceptible to these illusions than students.

“Radiosists have this ability to really focus on the key elements of the visual scene, where they ignore unrelated contexts and have tunnel vision,” says Wincza. “By adjusting your targets, they don’t experience that much illusion.”

In the fourth illusion, one of the shapes was vertical, and the pair was horizontal. This made the latter look even wider, even if it was actually narrower. Both groups were equally susceptible to fantasy. This is probably because this didn’t involve much of an adjustment to background distraction, as it didn’t contain any surrounding objects.

“It suggests that if everyone trains themselves, they can gain the ability to be susceptible to illusions,” he says. Carla Evans At York University, UK. Focusing on certain aspects of photography, for example, could improve this ability, but she says there is more work to see how fast this can be. “It could take years or weeks.”