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Seeing and Perception

Dauerausstellung

Seeing and Perception

Does what we see really correspond to reality? How do we perceive brightness, color, and motion? How do we recognize objects, shapes, and spatial depth? And is it only our eyes that can be deceived?

Nothing is As it Seems!

Test your ability to perceive the world. Try out these optical illusions involving color, motion, and other qualities.

Seeing

Most people register optical stimuli in their environment with their eyes. Yet they do not see large portions of electro-magnetic radiation. The “image” that the brains makes of its environment is always incomplete. Therefore, the world that each individual perceives does not correspond with the physical world. If we human beings had additional sensory organs, the world would look very different to us!

Several teenagers are looking at a table and watching black-and-white spinning tops spin.
When the spinning tops are spinning, you can see colors on their surfaces, even though the surfaces themselves are black and white. visitBerlin, Photo: Dirk Mathesius 1/1

Perception

Most of the phenomena in this section cannot be described, or cannot be described fully, by the laws of physics. Most of them are based on the psychology of perception and physiological processes.

A man is conducting an experiment on a wall: black-and-white striped strips are offset from one another. They appear crooked.
Also known as the coffee-wall illusion: If the individual strips are slightly offset from one another, the lines appear crooked. SDTB/ Photo: C. Kirchner 1/1