When you see a bag of carrots at the grocery store, does your mind go to potatoes and parsnips or buffalo wings and celery? It depends, of course, on whether you're making a hearty winter stew or ...

Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

By activating the visual cortex electrically, those modules generate simple spots or patterns of light that the brain can try ...

In a massive scientific effort, hundreds of researchers have helped to map the connections between hundreds of thousands of neurons in the mouse brain and then overlayed their firing patterns in ...

An illusion is when we see and perceive an object that doesn't match the sensory input that reaches our eyes. In the case of the image below, the sensory input is four Pac Man–like black figures. But ...

Already in the 1960s, Hubel and Wiesel proposed a model according to which visual perception is the result of orderly, stepwise computations in the brain – with specialized neurons in the cortex ...

“Illusions are fun, but they are also a gateway to perception,” says Hyeyoung Shin, assistant professor of neuroscience at Seoul National University. Shin is the first author of a new study in Nature ...

A research group led by Prof. Zhang Peng from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed how the human brain resolves perceptual conflicts and generates conscious ...

Illusions go viral: From Reddit’s hidden-number spirals to the legendary duck-rabbit, optical illusions keep sparking debates and fascination online by revealing how context shapes what we see.