A TED-Ed Animation Explaining How Optical Illusions Fool Our Brains

“How Do Optical Illusions Work” is a TED-Ed animation by educator Nathan S. Jacobs, animator Lisa LaBracio and director Biljana Labovic that explains how optical illusions manage to trick our brains into thinking we’re seeing something we’re actually not.

Your brain isn’t being lazy, it’s just very busy, so it spends cognitive energy as efficiently as possible using assumptions about visual information to create a tailored, edited vision of the world.