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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

If you don't know how something works, break it. Science is built on creative destruction: Much of what neuroscientists know of the brain, they know from what gets lost during brain injuries. Under happier circumstances, they glimpse the functioning of visual perception from how it breaks down in optical illusions. For instance, the 3-D Escher-like illusions created by Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University exploit our brain's tendency to see all angles as right angles.

Some of the most dramatic illusions involve apparent motion—these appear to spin, shimmer, or shimmy even though they're completely static, like Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie–Woogie or the psychedelic pinwheels of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a psychologist at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Two more Japanese mathematicians, Hitoshi Arai at the University of Tokyo and his wife, Shinobu Arai, have created a new class of them, known as fuyuu, or floating, illusions.

The Arais have an extensive online gallery with commentary in Japanese, as well as an abridged English version. In addition to their own creations, they have collected inadvertent illusions from the real world, such as buildings that, viewed from certain angles, appear to switch places because of how their windows and other design elements line up.

Don't believe everything you see

Source: http://nautil.us/blog/how-japanese-floating-illusions-reverse_engineer-what-we-see

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