Vision trumps all the senses. Half of the brain’s resources are dedicated to seeing and interpreting what we see. What our eyes physically perceive is only one part of the story. The images coming into our brains are changed and interpreted. It’s really our brains that are “seeing”.
To better understand the concept, let’s dig into the topic by proving some facts about the brain.
what you see is different from what your brain gets
You think that as you’re walking around looking at the world, your eyes are sending information to your brain, which processes it and gives you a realistic experience of “what’s out there.” But the truth is that what your brain comes up with isn’t exactly what your eyes are seeing. Your brain is constantly interpreting everything you see.
for example, look at the image below:
What do you see? At first, you probably know a triangle with a black border in the background and an upside-down, white triangle on top of it. Of course, that’s not really what’s there. In reality, there are merely lines and partial circles.
Your brain creates the shape of an upside-down triangle out of space because that’s what it expects to see. This particular illusion is called a Kanizsa triangle, named for the Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa, who developed it in 1955.
The brain creates shortcuts
Your brain creates these shortcuts to make sense of the world around you quickly. Your brain receives millions of sensory inputs every second (the estimate is 40 million), and it’s trying to make sense of all of that input.
It uses rules of thumb, based on experience, to make guesses about what you see. Most of the time, that works, but sometimes it causes errors.
You can influence what people see or think by using shapes and colors. The following image shows how color can draw attention to one message over another.
