Freaky Double Take Moments That Had Our Eyes Thoroughly Tricked

Eric Lund

Jan 31, 2022 4:00 PM EST

As amazing as the human eye is, it's remarkable how easy it is to trick. Millions of years of evolution would have you thinking that you have this amazing tool that can perfectly detect an astonishing amount of information at a rapid rate. But guess what, if someone's pants are the same color as the grass, your first thought is "whoa that guy learned how to levitate, that's crazy." 99 percent of the time our eyes and brain come to terrifically reasonable conclusions, but that last one percent has us actually thinking "isn't it interesting that that man has the face of a horse."

It doesn't even take a whole lot to sway our sense of reality. One well-placed shadow or warped perspective and we're baffled for half a minute. One upside-down dog's face and we think we've discovered a new species. If someone puts Bugles on their fingers, there's a very small fraction of a second where we seriously have to consider whether or not witches exist. It makes sense that our brains default to alarm. If in fact there was a possibility that we lived in a world filled with levitating trash cans and dogs with human butts, it would be better that our mind can first detect it as a supernatural threat. But that's not the case, so instead we just see things the wrong way and our friends point out to us that we are dumb all the time.