30 Pics From The Group That Shares Photos That You Might Need To Look At Twice To Understand

People certainly like pictures where their brains trick them into something that isn’t really there. The Forced Perspective subreddit currently has two million members (or ‘confusers,’ as they call them). There’s one thing to note here, though: the community wants you to know they’re not about pareidolia or things that look like other things.

The Redditors here are interested in photos taken from a certain perspective which results in some kind of optical illusion. Usually, it’s what photographers call “forced perspective.” Good examples of forced perspective are photos people like to take while traveling. They manipulate the scale and depth of objects in order for them to appear smaller or bigger, closer or farther away.

Many filmmakers use forced perspective in their films. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a great example, where the director Peter Jackson made the average adult-height actors look like small hobbits. It’s an optical illusion of sorts: by placing objects that are bigger farther away from the camera, you can make them smaller in scale, and vice versa.

Who hasn’t fallen into an optical illusion rabbit hole at 2 A.M. and seen the most popular ones like the classic black and white spiral, the “Rabbit or duck?” picture, or the cafe wall where every line is actually straight but appears crooked? Yet pictures aren’t the only media where our brains can’t tell if what we’re seeing is true or not. Architecture has its fair share of optical illusions, too.

Another interesting example of forced perspective is the buildings at Disneyland, the Snow White and the Sleeping Beauty castles in particular. The ground stories of both (and many other buildings in Disneyland, for that matter) are full-scale. But all the upper levels get exponentially smaller.

What’s the point of building the Disney castles with upper stories decreasing in height? It gives off the illusion of grandeur; as you enter Main Street USA, the castle looks huge and very far away. Yet when you’re walking back from it towards the exit, the street seems much smaller and that much more manageable.

Do you know who else used forced perspective in architecture? The Ancient Greeks! The Parthenon, for example, has columns that are thicker in the middle than the ends and a slight bulge in their platforms. That’s so that they appear straight from a distance because parallel lines tend to appear to converge. When the columns of a building taper off at the top, the buildings would also appear larger from a distance.

In optical illusions where the picture messes with our brains’ capacity to understand colors, it’s often because of our perception of lighting. Remember the famous debate about whether the dress was black and blue or white and gold? Although it was actually black and blue, many people assumed it was in a shadow and said it was white and gold.

Today, researchers can confidently say that the debate happened because of people’s assumptions about illumination. “Color perception depends on the observers’ assumptions and beliefs about the scene,” a conclusion of one study reads. Essentially, people made their decision based on whether they believed that the dress was in a shadow or not.

Optical illusions can open an interesting and somewhat worrying can of worms: our brains can’t always differentiate between reality and illusion. Scientists say that even when we know about the trick behind the optical illusion, we still can’t unsee it. “You can’t seem to consciously override the ‘wrong’ interpretation,” neuroscientist Judy Gardner told Vox.

The reality is that our senses lag behind what’s really happening at the moment. Our brains make predictions based on the information we have, and that’s how we get optical illusions. Neuroscientist Adam Hantman says that our brains predict, and our senses correct. “If you were always using sensory information, errors would accumulate in ways that would lead to quite catastrophic effects on your motor control,” he explained.

How many of the photos in this list confused you, dear Pandas? Do you have any photos of your own shot from an interesting or confusing perspective? Share them with us in the comments! And if you’d like to see more similar lists, you can head over here, here, here, and here!