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Before Christ (BC), people didn’t know anything about
optical illusion so they might not know what they were
looking at, it could of been an optical illusion they had no
idea if their brain was playing tricks on them or if their
eyes were playing tricks on them.
When optical illusions were invented people didn’t know if
their brains were playing tricks on them or if their eyes
were playing tricks on them. Most people tried to explain
optical illusions but they all failed.
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Epicharmus and Protagorus are the two
people who invented optical illusions, they both lived around 450 B.C.
Epicharmus believed that our senses (seeing, hearing,
smelling, tasting and touching) were not paying enough
attention and were "messing up". His exact words were,
"The
mind sees and the mind hears. The rest is blind and deaf."
Protagorus didn’t
believe that what Epicharmus said was true. He
thought that our senses and bodies were fine. He
believed it was our environment that was messing us
up. His words were “Man
is nothing but a bindle of sensations.”
Aristotle, who lived around 350 B.C. said
both Epicharmus and Protagorus were both right and
wrong. He said
our senses can be
trusted, but they can be easily fooled.
For example: when it’s a very hot day and you
stand near the road, heat waves rise and we can see
them. Our senses are right, we can see the waves.
But, if you look through the waves at a tree, the
tree appears to be wiggling. That is when our sense
get fooled.
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Bust of Protagoras
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| Name: |
Protagoras
(Ðñùôáãüñáò) |
| Birth: |
ca.490 |
| Death: |
20BC |
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Another Greek was Plato.
Plato, who lived around 300
B.C., said our five senses need our mind to help to
understand what they see. What he is saying is that
the eyes and mind need to work together.
That is exactly what we think now, smart Plato.
As time passed finally someone
got interested in optical illusions again. In 1826,
a psycohologist
Johannes Mueller wrote two books about visual
illusions. He was the first person to call
distortions visual illusion. That is why most
people knew what he was talking about in his books |
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Then in 1854 another psychologist
named J.J. Oppel finished where Johannes
Mueller left off. He made a paper that had 10 pages
of line illusions. Nobody had seen one of them until
J.J. had published it in the paper. As soon as the
people saw them, they became very popular. Almost
everyone liked it for a while. It was so popular
that an illusion was made called the Mueller Lyer
illusions. Also twelve theories were made to explain
it. But sooner
or later people got bored of it. From 1912 to 1950
out of 4,250 articles in newspapers, magazines, and
journals only 4 were about optical illusions.
Nobody can figure out why and how
optical illusions became interesting again. But now
we have tons of books on them and several different
web pages. They entertain us, are used in art,
music, jobs, and nature Today we see optical
illusions everywhere when we look at a television, computers
screen, magazines, we are just seeing millions of
colours but it is really just dots coloured in red,
green, and
blue. (If you look closely
enough at a magazine or television or computer screen you can see
the little dots.)
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John Tyndall |
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Birth: |
August 2,
1820
Leighlinbridge,
County Carlow,
Ireland |
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Death: |
December 4,
1893
(aged 73)
Surrey,
England |
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