Wrong by Design

Neuroscientists usually explain color illusions in mechanistic terms: They arise because of the way cells in the retina and the brain respond to certain wavelengths of light. Those explanations miss the larger point, says Beau Lotto, a reader in trans­disciplinary brain research at University College London. We misperceive colors and shapes because our visual sense has been molded by evolutionary history. Lotto’s lab, which fuses art and neuroscience, has created dozens of optical illusions to study the systematic goofs that evolution has built into our minds. He proposes that visual glitches are the result of a brain that is beautifully calibrated to detect biologically relevant information—responding effectively to motion (which might indicate a predator on the run) while messing up on simplecolor matching, which generally has little relevance to survival.