One of the most universally known and timeless pieces of advice relates to the way we perceive our world, and I'm sure you've witnessed its truth play out countless times in your life. You may have heard it in any number of forms - "don't judge a book by it's cover," "things are not always what they seem," "look beneath the surface," etc. They all point to one over-arching truth: our perception is not always perfect, so be aware that not all information will be immediately presented to you about a specific person, object, or experience.

This concept is one that artists experiment with quite frequently and across many mediums. Challenging visual perception is perhaps one of the easiest ways to quickly illustrate that things are not always what they seem to be, as humans rely most heavily on their sense of vision to make sense of the surrounding world. According to National Geographic, about 30% of the neurons in the brain's cortex are designated to make sense of our visual experiences, while only 8% of neurons are devoted to the sense of touch, and only 2% are devoted to hearing. Because we rely so heavily on our vision to glean information about our surroundings, our minds have developed information processing methods that are what we might call "muscle-memory." What I mean by this is that, once you've had the same visual experiences enough times, your mind gets used to processing that particular type of information and so it becomes easier to process the same information in the future.

As an example, think about the way a 1-year-old interacts with a spoon versus the way that an adult interacts with a spoon. To a 1-year old, a spoon is a rather abstract idea. It's a familiar object, sure, but a 1-year-old has very little information engrained in his brain about this particular object. There is still learning to be done and ideas to be comprehended before that 1-year-old will see a bowl of soup and automatically associate that a "spoon" is what is necessary to eat the soup (and to then go get a spoon and use it properly). For an adult, all of this is completely second-nature. When you start cooking soup, you don't even have to think about retrieving a spoon, you just do. This level of second-nature perception that requires little to no active thinking is exactly what gets us into trouble when we are confronted with visual tricks, just like the one in the video below.

Artist Johannes Stötter uses our trained methods of perception against us by painting human bodies to look like something else entirely. The result is that an unsuspecting eye will see the painted object, a chameleon, rather than seeing the human canvases beneath the paint. Our minds try to process the image as quickly and efficiently as possible, and so most people will simply see a chameleon in the image below unless prompted to look harder. Watching the form change from that of a chameleon into that of two people is a great way of reminding us all of that age old lesson: things are not always as they seem.