Three quick brain teaser games to test your perceptual and cognitive skills

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An always delight­ful way to learn more about our brains and minds is to expe­ri­ence so-called opti­cal illu­sions and to see how we react to them.

Below you have three fun ones to tease, and prob­a­bly even puz­zle, you mind.

Ready, set, go!

1. Where is that couple’s baby?

baby illusion test

2. Are those two orange circles of the same exact size, or not?

3. Is it all black and white, or are there gray dots below, at the intersections?

herman grid illusion test

 

ANSWERS AND EXPLANATIONS

1. Can you see that couple’s baby?

You should be able to see a cou­ple, a large tree … and an even larg­er baby, fac­ing upwards.

This is a great exam­ple of an illu­so­ry con­tour. The baby’s head is on the left, the baby’s feet are against the trunk of the tree on the right..

2. The Ebbinghaus Illusion

The two orange cir­cles are exact­ly the same size, even though the one on the left seems much small­er. This size dis­tor­tion is caused by the size of the sur­round­ing cir­cles and their dis­tance to the cen­ter cir­cle..

3. Hermann Grid illusion

There are not gray dots in this grid. How­ev­er, prob­a­bly you per­ceive some ghost­like gray blobs at the inter­sec­tions of the white lines — incred­i­bly those gray dots dis­ap­pear when you look direct­ly at them.

See below a beau­ti­ful exam­ple of the Her­mann Grid illu­sion in the real-world: You will notice faint white cir­cles appear where the hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal slats inter­sect in the win­dow frame (even if no white cir­cles are there at all!)

 

More fun brain teasers, puzzles and games for teens and adults: