A picture is worth a thousand words, but if there’s an unexpected twist hiding in the background, it might be worth two thousand. We’re all familiar with optical illusions, but usually they are created on purpose. It’s a rare occasion when an unsuspecting photo becomes an optical illusion after people look at it and start saying, “Wait a second…” While most of the photos here are funny based on what’s in the background or peeking out from a corner, some are just our eyes playing tricks on us. 

To learn more about how our eyes can fool us, we checked out this Vox article that explains how each of our realities are constructed by our own brains. “It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College, told Vox. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.” He explained that typically, what our brains tell us does match up with the real world, but sometimes our brains work to fill in gaps, which can warp our perception of reality. 

In his article, Brian Resnick explains that the fact that visuals can trick us may seem disheartening at first, but we shouldn’t look at it that way. We can actually learn a great deal about how our brains work when we know what can confuse or fool them. He goes on to explain that the more we understand about how our brains work, the more we might be able to understand one another. Rather than being frustrated by someone who perceives the world differently, have some compassion. After all, their brain is feeding them a slightly different message than what yours is telling you. We should be curious about these differences and investigate them.

Brian also poses the question of why we are seeing a story of the world rather than the full picture. Apparently, we evolved to be this way. “We don’t have the necessary machinery, and we wouldn’t even want it, to process carefully all of the amount of information that we’re constantly bombarded with,” Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist and illusion researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, told Vox.

When we see an object move, for example, there is a complicated process happening inside of us. “Once light hits the retinas at the back of our eyeballs, it’s converted into an electrical signal that then has to travel to the visual processing system at the back of our brains,” Brian explains. “From there, the signal travels forward through our brains, constructing what we see and creating our perception of it. This process just takes time.” 

If we only relied on what our brain had fully processed, our reflexes would be too slow for us to have very good coordination. So we need our brains to fill in the gaps and make predictions for us. When we see something moving, we see it just a tad bit further along than it actually is because we know where it’s headed. And when we see a confusing photo, it can be very hard to convince our brains that what it initially thought was happening might not actually be the case.