Optical Illusions — Tests Predicting the Future?
Neuroscientists have recently discovered that optical illusions tell us a lot about the way the human brain perceives the business world. In other words, the brain doesn’t passively and faithfully report what it sees. Instead, our brains create an improvised reality, based upon educated guesses about we see. This is due to how it takes much less processing power, by burning fewer calories, for the brain to loosely sketch out what it sees based on a few simple rules. For example, one common rule is how shapes that appear fragmented usually aren’t, so we fill in the gaps. This is much easier process compared to the brain rigorously processing and computing complete and accurate pictures. As a result, these shortcuts not only conserve energy (our brains consume 20% of our daily calorie usage), but also speed up decision-making (Haseltine, 2010)
Your brain forms perception of the future in the same way it perceives the present. This is done by sketching extrapolations and interpolations of what it sees to flesh out what it doesn’t see. For example, if you’re a businessperson, you’ll view your firm’s future as an extrapolation of its past. And the more long-lived and successful your company, the more your brain will see a future that closely resembles the firm’s history. Unfortunately, the accelerating pace of change in the business world guarantees that the stable future you see is an illusion (Haseltine, 2010).
In other words, we knew we had a problem forming accurate visions of the future, because we were acutely aware of the human brain’s tendency to fill in the blanks with bad data. When left to their own devices, our brains would give us a faulty and overly conservative vision of our future.
So how do we actually practice filling in the blanks? We do optical illusion exercises! In turn, the more we do these exercises, the more we will automatically fill in the blanks. Hence, the greater the automaticity, the greater we will be able to fill in the blanks towards our future!
Here comes the fun part!
Here is the link to a website full of optical illusions: http://www.scientificpsychic.com/graphics/index.html
Haseltine, E. (2010, August 16). Optical illusions can help you predict the future. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/long-fuse-big-bang/201008/optical-illusions-can-help-you-predict-the-future
