Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

Illusions go viral: From Reddit’s hidden-number spirals to the legendary duck-rabbit, optical illusions keep sparking debates ...

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon that causes multiple senses to mix. For some synesthetes, time isn’t just a ticking ...

Researchers at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology find that the hippocampus sends signals to the visual cortex to predict what we are about to see. Our brains are powerful prediction machines ...

An illusion is when we see and perceive an object that doesn't match the sensory input that reaches our eyes. In the case of the image below, the sensory input is four Pac Man–like black figures. But ...

Researchers at Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), led by Prof. Vincent Bonin, have published two new studies uncovering how visual information is processed and distributed in the brain. The ...

When animals move through complex visual environments, the brain cannot afford to analyze every detail one by one. Instead, it rapidly extracts the overall structure of the scene—for example, the mean ...

Neuroscientists have discovered how the brain distinguishes between visual motion occurring in the external world from that caused by the observer moving through it. Known as the 'motion-source ...

The 1950s were a relatively rudimentary era for experimental neurophysiology. Recording the electrical activity of neurons wasn’t uncommon, but the methods often demanded considerable patience and ...