How Our Brains See A Black And White Photo With Optical Illusions?

When it comes to optical illusions, it is absolutely amazing how human brains convert a 2D image into another one in 3D. Since a long time ago, people have considered optical illusions to confuse our brains, and now there is a new claim spreading like wildfire on the internet. It is claimed that optical illusions simply trick our brains into seeing a black & white picture as a colored one.

The author of this photo is Øyvind Kolås, a software developer and digital media artist of an open-source graphics editor from a project called GIMP. Kolås prefers calling the photo a “'color assimilation grid illusion' since it is a part of the visual perception experiments. In order to create this effect, he layered a slender grid of some selectively oversaturated colored lines over a black & white image. As Kolås explained on his patreon page, this resulted in a perception that the grayscale cells were colored. 

In addition, Kolås also mentioned the way the required overall processing to create this image being conducted as a result of significant code development. Still, how can our brains literally perceive and output 3D environment out of this 2D illustration?

According to ScienceAlert, a vision scientist from the University of Sydney - Bart Anderson - stated that the color system is referred to as 'low pass.' For example, a majority of the receptive fields being color-coded are pretty large. As a result, the grids get averaged with a neutral background that then causes an error in the way our brains illustrate the visual scenes. Basically, our perceptions of things around us have much more to deal with how brains process them in opposition to the visual of our eyes.

As for the whole photo, not only the colored grid but also the lines and dots can be used to trick our brains.