If you’ve been on the internet for long enough, you’ll very likely be aware of what confusing perspective is. As a phenomenon, it’s quite literally what it sounds like—pictures of things that are placed in ways that make it look like it’s other things. We know this description leaves much to be desired, but it’s what it’s.

A popular hub for sharing all things confusing and perspective is a subreddit of the same name. Created back in June of 2014, r/Confusing_Perspective is today home to 1.9 million members and is ranked in the top 1% by size on Reddit. So, there is definitely a following of sorts online.

Confusing perspective photos are more or less illusions of sorts, except the methods of the matter differ. And illusions are a whole bucket of chum that requires an understanding how the human brain works.

The tl;dr version is that the brain is a blind blob of neurons and has to rely on the eyes for guidance, but the brain has to use its own imagination anyway.

But if we were to look into it in more detail, the brain is all about interpretation and nothing about perception. Since it doesn’t have eyes, ears or any of the other senses in and of itself, it relies on the appropriate sensory organs to tell it what’s what.

And this is where the fun begins because the brain doesn’t necessarily understand everything that these organs tell it. And so it has to resort to filling in the gaps.

The filling in of the gaps is in part due to the fact that the sensory faculties use simple language to describe things to the brain. We shouldn’t expect an eye to know Shakespearean, right? So, the brain makes due with what it gets, but pulls its weight around by adding more details to things to the best of its knowledge.

A perfect example of this is peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is essentially side vision—everything that is to the extreme side, off the center of our visual focus. The way our eyes work don’t really allow as much peripheral vision as we can actually sense when we look at things. But the brain expands upon the field of view by assuming the things and projecting an image for us.

So, circling back at the issue of how illusions work—images with ambiguous representations confuse the brain, abusing its superpower of filling in the gaps, but the brain fails to do so correctly. Remember, it tries to guesstimate visuals and make sense of them, and it can be wrong about it. This is why some illusions get trippy in our eyes.

Due to these deficiencies in how our brain works, we can also only see one side of a picture. My Wife and My Mother-in-Law is a great example of this. It’s the famous picture in which some folks only see a young woman facing away or an elderly woman facing to the side. Some folks can see both, some only see one of them. But it’s fun stuff, right?

Why does any of it matter? Besides proving to be quite a fun distraction in life, it has opened up a vast sea of opportunity for research. You see, some illusions are based on brightness and apparent motion.

This alone has led to a better understanding of how our brain works by putting together several separate processing streams across multiple processing stages to make sense of things. This alone is proof of what kind of a powerhouse the human brain is. And if that doesn’t sound absolutely amazing, we don’t know what is then.

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