Why Optical Illusions Give Me Hope for a Better World

Our minds tell us stories about what is happening, but it uses materials from our past to do so. What happens when those materials are flawed, broken, or unreliable?

I love optical illusions. I’m also a sucker for magic, fwiw. Basically, I like being tricked when I know that I’m being tricked.

Yes, please, blow my mind. Amaze me. Confuse me. Surprise me.

For instance, stare at the dot on the left…

It seems like the object on the right is moving diagonally, right? Well it’s not. It’s going straight up and down. 😳

And then there’s one of my favs, the spinning dancer.

Is she spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Yes. Both. At the same time. Your brain will make a choice on which direction to tell you she’s spinning… and then, well, it may change its mind without notice and now she’s spinning the other way.

Fun, right?

Optical illusions delight me for a couple reasons.

1. They keep me humble.

2. They illustrate something deeply true about life.

Allow me to explain.

Stay Humble, You Don’t Know it All

Optical illusions (and magic) remind me that I don’t know everything. For example I may be convinced that the square in this video changes color, but I’m just… wrong.

I/you/we are often convinced that our perspectives and ideas and beliefs are right. Which is fine, they wouldn’t be our convictions if we didn’t also think them true. But can we maybe hold our ideas a little more loosely, as a way of practicing humility that maybe just maybe we don’t have it all figured out?

Optical illusions are fun, yes, because they arouse surprise and delight, but I sometimes wonder why it seems we don’t take the lessons learned in optical illusions and apply them to other aspects of our lives.

I wrote the other day about how differently people perceived and interpreted one particular moment of the Olympics Opening Ceremonies (the tableau of the Drag Queens), as well as the Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif.

Why Do Some See 'The Last Supper' and 'a Man,' Contrary to Competing Evidence?

In that post I referenced something called “naive realism,” the idea that we convince ourselves that our perspective maps on perfectly with objective reality. We see it clearly and rightly, therefore if someone else has a different take on the matter then, well, they must be uninformed or just plain wrong.

In that first illusion up above, where the object on the right is objectively moving vertically up and down, imagine insisting to that object, “No, you are moving diagonally!” If all you ever do is stare at the dot on the left then on some level your insistence makes sense. You really do believe, with your whole heart, that the object is moving at angle.

But the strength or sincerity of your beliefs are not indicators of their veracity.

You might just be wrong. And optical illusions, and magic tricks, they reinforce this over and over: what you think you know, you don’t. Your confidence is misplaced. Stay tuned, Bucko, cause you’re about to be humiliated in the best way.

I can remember in my most earnest over-saved days (aka, the years in which I was at the height of my evangelical powers), my focus was so intense on the dot on the left, that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the other object was moving diagonally.

• I studied the Bible so intently (in a very, very specific way), that I knew that other religions were wrong.

• I stared so squarely at the theory of penal substitutionary atonement that I knew any other thoughts about the cross were wrong.

• I focused on the inerrancy of the Bible with such intensity that I cast any “liberal” scholarship as dangerous and heretical.

Just to name a few.

Thankfully over the past two decades I’ve allowed my eyes to wander to other parts of the canvas and see that I was just plain wrong about so many other objects.

One of the big Invitations* in my life these days is to take that lesson from my experience with religion and apply it to other areas of my life. In other words, where else might I be so focused on only looking at what I’ve always looked at and where I might then greatly benefit from the posture of, I might be totally wrong here.

Politics?
Relationships?
Parenting?

How might the humility that comes from optical illusions broaden my perspective in these other areas?

We All Tell Stories

Which leads me to the second reason why I love optical illusions, because they help to illustrate something deeply true about the human experience.

Optical illusions seem to play tricks on our mind, but “tricks” may not actually be the best word here because our minds are actually doing what they’ve evolved to do. Over millions of years of adaptation our brains developed the ability to generate a story about what’s happening and make a prediction of what’s about to happen.

For example, we see things not as they are but as they were—specially as they were about 100 milliseconds ago. That’s about how long it takes for something to make its way from our eyes to our brains and from our brains to our consciousness. But we’d be in real trouble if we lived our lives slightly behind reality all the time and so our brains evolved to anticipate. We predict what’s about to happen, and most of the times we are close enough. This lets us swat at flies, hit baseballs, and connect solidly on high-fives.

Also, as I mentioned the other day, our brains have to selectively choose which of the near infinite data available to us in any given moment to focus on.

All of that to say, our brains are telling us stories about our lives.

In many ways it’s really good at this. And also, in some ways, it’s not. Like, at all.

Because the only data it has to work with, to make these stories for us, is our past experiences. Our perception of any given moment is not only generated for us based on our past, but it is actually limited as a result of our past. This is where confirmation bias kicks in. We gravitate towards information that supports our already-believed-ideas. This is the brain being efficient and reasonable. Letting in conflicting or contradictory data is asking a lot, so our brains won’t do it unless we really really intend for it.

Then, to add insult to injury, for most of us there is some element of trauma in our past, which means even the data we do have is, in a sense, compromised.

Think about that for a moment.

Your brain, right now, is telling a story about your life and what’s happening in and around you. It does this for your own survival. This is a good thing.

However, the building blocks it has to create that story is confined by your own past experiences. Which, fine, not a big deal, this isn’t a value judgement (especially since this is happening for all of us). You might very well have some great blocks to work with.

And yet, the final piece to this naturally occurring equation, is that for some (many?) of us, some (many?) of our blocks are in rough shape. Busted blocks, deformed blocks, strangely shaped blocks. Sure, we can build something out of it, but there’s clearly cracks in the seams, the foundation is wobbly, and it’s very possible that what we’ve built has started to do us more harm than good. (I’m referring here to the ways in which we, as children, developed certain behaviors and personality traits as means of survival. They “worked” for us back then, but now they tend to hold us back from flourishing.)

So where am I going with all this?

I guess it’s this…

You Can Improve Your Raw Materials, But You’re Still Limited

As I was enjoying some optical illusions the other day, and appreciating the way that simple pixels on a screen were messing up my perceptions of reality and obliterating my naive-realism, and I was reminded that what-I-think-I-know may not be as true as I think it is…

I settled into a sobering awareness of just how unconscious I am most of the time.

While the perspective from the Eiffel Tower is impressive (H/T to Paris and the Olympics!), you’re still limited and can’t see everything.

Before I began therapy about ten years ago, the building blocks my brain had to work with, the pieces my mind pulled from in order to tell the story of my life and the world around me, were unbelievably impaired.

• The traumatic years of my parent’s divorce imprinted on my body a constant sense of insecurity and stress.

• The inability of either of my caregivers (due to their own traumatic pasts and unprocessed pain) to provide me the kind of nurture necessary for a healthy and whole development ensured my nervous system never knew what “regulated” meant.

• The above two realities from my past established a flimsy foundation for all future stories. Even as I grew in to adulthood the stories my mind told me about my life and relationships and the world around me were at best unreliable, and at worst disastrous.

• I spent the first three decades of my life convinced I wasn’t worthy of love and care—at least, not inherently. I had worth and value insofar as I did the right things or achieved success (was the story my brain told me based on the data it had).

• In conflict, my brain/body/nervous system told me, “Get out of here. Shut down. Retreat. You’re not safe here, you must flee.” That’s how I learned to do it, so how could I do it any other way?

• I had no access to my emotional landscape and no ability to name them (oh but I could feel them!). And with no ability to name them, I had no ability to handle/control/responsibly engage with them.

I could go on, but hopefully enough of my point is clear.

Yes, therapy has made a huge difference.

And yes, psychedelics made an even more impactful difference in all this.

I am, without a doubt, far more awake to the building blocks of my mind. And I am (I think/hope/believe) far more adept at acknowledging when I’m only staring at the dot on the left side of the screen. And I think it’s fair to say that many of the broken, immature, unhelpful blocks of the past have been repaired, replaced, updated, or improved—in other words, healed.

And yet, I still must accept the limitations of my perspectives.

I still must remain humble to accept that I might be wrong.

Though my raw materials are better now than they once were (praise God. Srsly.), this does not make me immune from the truth that I simply do not (and can not) have ALL the materials there is to work with that would round out the full picture for something close to resembling objectivity and/or Truth.

I am limited, and so are you.

I can only work with what I have, and so can you.

And what I have is imperfect, as is what you have.

Our best hope for relationships…

Our best hope for societies…

Our best hope for a world…

where we grow closer to one another in love, acceptance, and kindness…

is when we all accept these limitations in ourselves, and extend grace for the limitations of others.

I don’t know everything. Neither do you.

But that’s okay, we can still be friends.

And that, dear reader, is why I love optical illusions.

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*Something I do these days is think of God’s presence in my life as Invitations, with a capital “I.” It’s my way of naming where, in my life, I feel called to grow, to expand, to deepen. An Invitation is like an open armed greeting from the Divine saying, “Hey, come this way if you’d like. It won’t be easy… in fact, it’s a pretty narrow path… but there will come a point where you will be grateful that you came this way. And that’s not nothing.”