Circles or rectangles? And does the answer depend on where you grew up?

11 Bluestein 2 7/5/2025, 7:28:06 AM theguardian.com ↗

Comments (2)

austin-cheney · 9h ago
This is supremely interesting because all the evidence indicates people default to susceptibility to these Ponzo and Müller-Lyer illusions irrespective of cultural and socioeconomic status. I remember falling victim to these illusions as a child myself.

What makes this interesting is the inverse. What about the commonalities of people who are blind to the bias imposed by these illusions? Now I am blind to the illusions. I am trying to see the visual bias I remember experiencing as a child but I cannot see it in any examples. I have searched online for more examples and to no avail.

I suspect that when I did fall for the illusions the contextual interference of additional information biased my thinking towards false conclusions. Why is that not so now? The change is not a casual shift of perception but a complete and absolute non cognitive hard difference. Does that illusion blindness influence other perceptions/conclusions and does it do so uniformly in ways not applicable to persons without such illusion blindness?

Bluestein · 9h ago
This is an obvious question but ... could not also our neurons get "rewired" over time, to where you can no longer see it?