IS SEEING BELIEVING?

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 102, 2 May 1931, Page 3 (Supplement)

IS SEEING BELIEVING?

There is an old saying that "seeing is believing," but have read through this article you might feel like changing it to "seeing is deceiving." Do you know your eyes can play you funny tricks at times? The reason for this is often that our sense of sight is made up of two things—the actual seeing with the eyes, and what our brain tells us about what we see. A good illustration is the word "Melbourne" in one of the drawings (Fig. 7). All that the eyes see is just the "shadow" outline of the word, for that is all that has been printed on the paper. Your brain steps in, however, and makes you imagine that you see the whole word, and not merely the outline. -

Look at the three dogs in Fig. 1. Which do you think is the largest? The one farthest away looks the largest, and the one nearest looks the smallest, yet all three dogs are exactly the same in size and shape, as you can find by measuring them. The apparent difference in size is due to the perspective.

The centre circles of Fig. 2 are exactly the same size, although the centre circle in the small pattern appears much larger than the centre circle in the large pattern, because of the different size of the circles surrounding them. In Fig. 3 the two horizontal lines are actually parallel, but they appear to spread out towards the ends, due to the slanting .lines that cross them. " " "" ' *■ ' " m

No one looking at Fig. 4 would imagine that the distances between the arrow heads in all of the linee are the same. Apply a rule to them and you will find that they are.

Vertical lines generally seem longer than horizontal lines. This is illustrated in Fig. 5. Here the bottom line is

exactly the same length as any one of the three vertical lines, although it appears much shorter.

The inside circles in Fig. 6 are of the same size, but doesn't the inside circle on the left appear to be larger than the one on the right? Very often, you see, we do not see things as they really are. Our brain is fooled by the messages sent to it from the eyes. Fortunately for us, our eyes do not often

fool us in this way, or it would be very awkward for us. But it just shows you that you cannot always believe what you see.