Our twisted mind

A chapter from the book "Mind and Soul - How the Mind Creates Our Mental World" by Chris Frith, S. Zeke Jerusalem Publishing House

Before the discovery of the phenomenon of change blindness, visual illusions were considered the pet trick of psychologists. Here, too, we have a simple demonstration of the principle that not everything we see exists in reality. Most of these visual illusions have been known to psychologists for over a century; They were known to artists and architects long before that.
Here is a simple example, the Hering illusion.
The horizontal lines (in the top picture) look really bent, but if we place a ruler along them, we will find that they are perfectly straight. Many visual illusions are known, in which straight lines appear as if they were bent, as well as illusions in which things of the same size appear as if they were different in size. The background on which the lines or objects are drawn does not allow us to see them as they really are.

Such distorted impressions are found not only in psychology textbooks. They can also be seen in things that exist in the real world. The famous example is the Parthenon in Athens. The beauty of this building lies in its wonderful proportions and harmonious lines. However, in fact, the lines are neither straight nor parallel. The architects incorporated carefully calculated curves and distortions into the building, to give the building a straight and symmetrical appearance.
The most amazing thing about these delusions is, to me, that my mind keeps presenting me with wrong information. Even though I myself know that this information is wrong and even though the true shape of the object in front of me dawns on me, I cannot bring myself to see straight lines in the Hering illusion. The illusions of vision inherent in the Parthenon stand even after more than two thousand years.
The Ames room illustrates even more clearly the powerlessness of knowledge in itself to affect the experience of the visual world (see Figure 8b-).
I know these people are equal in size. The one on the left looks smaller, as it is further away from the camera eye. The room is not square. The left side of the back wall is much further away from us than the right side. The windows in the back wall were distorted to give them a square appearance (as in the Parthenon). Nevertheless, my mind chooses to see here a square room, in which there are three people who differ from each other in height to an unrealistic degree, and not three people whose measurements are normal, in a room built in such a special way.

There is at least one point of preference that my mind reveals, in this example. The image of the Aims room is essentially ambiguous. It can be seen as three extraordinary people standing in a square room, or alternatively, three ordinary people in a very strange room. My mind may choose an interpretation that is unlikely, but it is still a possible interpretation.
"There is no single correct interpretation," protests the English lecturer.
I maintain that even if the evidence is ambiguous, this does not mean that there is no correct interpretation at all. But apart from that, our mind hides this ambiguity from us and presents us with only one of the possible interpretations.
Moreover, sometimes our mind completely ignores evidence pertaining to the physical world.

Note 1:
In 1846, the Society of Enthusiasts (an association of nobles and dignitaries that supported the study of classical art) sent Francis Penrose to test John Pennethorne's theory that in works from the heyday of classical Greek architecture, the lines that appear straight and parallel are not . In fact, Penthorne argued, these lines are bent and slanted, as this is the only way to achieve the visual effect of straight lines. In 1847, when Penrose returned to England, he immediately published the first result of his research. It was an article called "Anomalies in the Parthenon Structure", in which he proved that the cornice lines in the Parthenon are bent inward.