In our everyday experience, it seems as though perception is simply a matter of information hitting your sense organs and going straight to our brain. In reality, however, perception turns out to be an incredibly sophisticated and complex concatenation of various brain modules actively trying to interpret and synthesize the disparate information sent by the different senses. The reason perception may seem to be a passive phenomenon is that it's effortless, but that doesn't mean that there's not a hell of a lot of stuff going on in the brain. It just means that our brains have evolved to do all this amazing work without making us consciously aware of what it's doing.
But how do we know that perception is an active process of interpretation, synthesis and recognition? Well, a great place to start would be the lessons we get from the study of
optical illusions, such as the following spooky Einstein illusion because even if you understand why you experience the illusion, you can't
not experience it. Feel your brain fooling you:
For a great introduction to perception and optical illusions, check out
Beau Lotto's TEDTalk.
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