Optical Illusions
Welcome everybody to the dizzy zone. Yes today I am going to talk to you about something mind dazzling, brain racking, eye twisting, noggin blowing, yes you guessed it Optical Illusions. Today I will take you on a journey through the world of impossible shapes, wavy straight lines and fat but thin figures.
So before I start with my speech I will tell you what things I will be talking about. So you know what an optical illusion is…... but do you know everything. If you do you are very smart and you don’t need to listen but are you sure that you know everything? I very much doubt it so let’s get started.
The first thing I will talk to you about is impossible shapes. Have you ever heard of them? Maybe maybe not but never the less they are pretty cool. What is an impossible shape? Well the answer to that is an impossible shape, hence its name. Fun Fact. Another name for an impossible shape is an Escher illusion, after the artist who made them popular, M.C. Escher (1898-1972). He was a Dutch graphic artist who was interested in Maths.
An example of an impossible shape would be a set of stairs that always go up but always end where they begin, or water flowing uphill.
Here is a picture of one of Escher’s impossible shapes.
So something else that you might wonder is how does an optical illusion work. Now this is quite a good question to ask. It is because your brain wants to have everything make sense but when it looks at the illusion it gets confused and starts making sense of the parts that it can even though the whole picture doesn’t make sense.
For example look at this picture. How many triangles are there? Now look again. There’s not actually any triangles for example this is just two sides, this is just 2 sides and this is just 2 sides. Your brain is trying to make sense of something that’s not there That’s why you saw triangles in this picture.
An interesting fact is that optical illusions can look different depending on where you were brought up. For example if you were brought up in Africa in the jungle somewhere where there isn’t many corners or small places then you will see an optical illusion differently to someone who was brought up in a city where there is lots of houses and box shapes.
For example, which one of these lines is longer?
You probably think it is this one*, but someone who grew up without buildings would see them as the same length.
That is because people who grew up with buildings are used to seeing lines with angles in the corners of rooms. So if you look at the corner of the room you it will kind of look like the arrows pointing out.
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Can optical illusions hurt your eyes? Have you ever looked at an optical illusion and your eyes have started hurting?... Or are they? Optical illusions can’t really hurt your eyes. If you stare too hard you might give yourself a headache but you won’t damage your eyes. This is because your brain is being overloaded with confusing messages and sending messages to your eyes saying “what is this.” Then your eyes get strained because they don’t know what to do.
I hope I have taught you a lot about optical illusions and I hope you can crack the unwritten code of an optical illusion the next time you see one.
Reflection
I am learning to write a speech.
I am so proud of writing an interesting speech.
It can be tricky to think of a subject to write your speech on.
My dad can help me by giving me ideas
The next step for me in my learning might be to write a more interesting speech.
