Stories by Stephen L. Macknik

Artists find mind-bending ways to bring impossible figures into three-dimensional reality

Military aviators learn to second-guess their senses

How do we fool thee? Let us count the ways that illusions play with our hearts and minds

Illusions that distort your perception

Eye gaze is critically important to social primates such as humans. Maybe that is why illusions involving eyes are so compelling

Pain is an emotion

Last week you chose the winners of the 12th annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Many of you have wondered how the illusions work, and what they tell us about our brains. I discuss each of the TOP 10 illusions here, and explain what we know

Congratulations to the winners of the 12th annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, hosted by the Neural Correlate Society. Thousands of online voters around the world chose the best illusions of the year

A critical new discovery redefines the primary organizing principle of the visual cortex, and explains much of the illusory perception when we see light and dark stimuli

They hijack its limited ability to deal with perceptual ambiguity

Humans are not the only species to use visual trickery to their advantage

Older people can struggle to see certain illusions, offering clues about the aging brain

Don’t miss the new neuro-magic video at Scientific American, featuring the amazing Joshua Jay!

Nineteenth-century entertainment was a peculiar mix of technological innovation and supernatural thinking

This week a new article on illusions from the Golden Age, written by Susana Martinez-Conde and me, came out: Scientific American Mind. The Victorian era was a watershed in brain science and the study of illusions and perception served as the cornerstone for the field of Psychology that grew from it. 

Haunted by a deceased brother, whom he saw as a twin, the Spanish artist filled his work with double meanings

A long lost painting called "La Bella Principessa" reveals the earliest known use of his famous enigmatic smile technique from before the Mona Lisa was painted. The master seemed to intuit that the visual system is blurred in the periphery, and used the illusion to heightened effect in his art.

There is no governmental institution more dedicated to rational thought and fairness than the justice system, but a new study shows that illusory facial perception is clouding the minds of our judges and juries, who can potentially decide to kill people based on their appearance. 

Can the output of the critters in your gut make your world illusory? Yes. And gassy, too.

Dozens of labs are investigating the internet phenomenon and developing new explanations

Our new column article (with co-author Bevil Conway, of Wellesley College & MIT)—on the topic of The Dress—came out on newsstands in Scientific American: Mind this week. In celebration of our new article, we thought we’d tell you about how the world’s largest vision sciences conference recently celebrated The Dress

This week the first wave of research from scientific journals has begun to be published; Current Biology has posted a trio of papers by three different prominent competing color vision labs, each describing their initial studies of The Dress. So in celebration of the scientific enterprise and its surprise boost from the world of fashion: here is a summary of those first three studies for reading pleasure.

These illusions explore how magicians, photographers and performance artists lead us to see motion where none exists

To celebrate our new article on implied motion in Scientific American Mind, here's a terrific movie of a chocolate zoetrope.