The Best Illusion of the Year contest offers researchers, and participants, an opportunity to explore the gaps and limits of human perception.
Take a look at this video of a waiting room. Do you see anything strange?
Perhaps you saw the rug disappear, or the couch pillows transform, or a few ceiling panels evaporate. Or maybe you didn’t. In fact, dozens of objects change in this video, which won second place in the Best Illusion of the Year Contest in 2021. Voting for the latest version of the contest opened on Monday.
Illusions “are the phenomena in which the physical reality is divorced from perception,” said Stephen Macknik, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn. He runs the contest with his colleague and spouse, Susana Martinez-Conde.
By studying the disconnect between perception and reality, scientists can better understand which brain regions and processes help us interpret the world around us. The illusion above highlights change blindness, the brain’s failure to notice shifts in the environment, especially when they occur gradually.
To some extent, all sensory experience is illusory, Dr. Martinez-Conde asserts.
“We are always constructing a simulation of reality,” she said. “We don’t have direct access to that reality. We live inside the simulation that we create.”
She and Dr. Macknik have run the illusion contest since 2005. What began as a public outreach event at an academic conference has since blossomed into an annual competition open to anyone in the world.