This Illusion Might Convince You to Dwell on Your Mistakes
Unpleasant as it may be, it’s often the wise thing to do
Square A and square B on this checkerboard are the very same color. Literally the same shade of gray.
Don’t believe me? Print the board and cut out the squares. In fact, print out a bunch and have your friends and family do the same. It’ll be fun, I promise.
The Checkershadow Illusion was created by MIT professor of vision science Edward Adelson, and it proves that we can be fooled by our sense of vision even when we know it’s fooling us.
“In many respects, failures of perception capture the essential nature of error.”
This is Kathryn Schulz’s illuminating lesson from Chapter 3, Our Senses, of her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
“Being wrong is often a side effect of a system that is functioning exactly right.”
Our senses do capture environmental stimuli, as they are built to do. But the process doesn’t end there. What we perceive is actually our brain’s interpretation of such stimuli. And this, my friends, is how it’s supposed to be.
