Written on August 24, 2024

It is a common belief that the eyes act as a kind of camera that shows us what is around us. Strangely enough, this is simply not true.

When light travels from a source and bounces off objects and then hits our eyelids, our eyes can transmit information about shape, color and more to our brains.

But this is not all that happens. The brain is interpreting its surroundings, even without you knowing it. What you actually see is a processed image, not the real thing.

Optical illusions are a great example of this effect. Optical illusions do not necessarily trick your eyes, but they trick your eyes' interpretation of the image.

Your eyes automatically fill in the blanks that have been left out, allowing the creators of optical illusions to play with shadows — and other things your eyes try to interpret automatically — to create images that are impossible to exist.

In short, your brain takes the information your eyes give it and interprets it. What you see is not necessarily what is in front of you, it is what your brain makes of what is in front of you.

From experiments with particle accelerators we know that not everything we see is really as it seems. Solid objects are mostly empty space with small particles in between.

These particles are in turn made up of even smaller particles and so on, which all move through space like waves. But we see this as a solid object, or our eyes interpret it as a solid object.

What else lies beyond the threshold of what our eyes are able to observe? Are our eyes masking a deeper reality right in front of us?