Researchers shot lasers into brain cells and triggered illusions on demand—a breakthrough that’s rewriting how we see the ...

PhD Candidate, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne Most of the time, our brains are very good at blending together input from all our senses into a seamless, unified ...

Get ready to have your brain twisted by some mind-bending optical illusions! One of the wildest is the Thatcher Effect, or Thatcher Illusion—it’s when an upside-down face looks normal, but flip it ...

Optical illusions come in all forms, from mind-melting artwork to photography trickery, but there's one style that never ...

This year marks the 16th edition of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest, hosted by the Neural Correlate Society since 2005. In the contest, cognitive scientists and visual artists from around the ...

Wars seem to breed fantasy: hero worship, victory parades, exuberant patriotism, or “a war to end all wars.” Such fantasies are usually based on inflated expectations, grand illusions, or outright ...

To some, the very idea of optimism seems peculiarly American. In fact, the concept was German, the word was French, and the trait precedes nations altogether: it is baked into our DNA. I’d argue–as ...

Most of the time, our brains are very good at blending together input from all our senses into a seamless, unified conscious experience of “my body.” When this process of integrating different sensory ...