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I showed people five optical illusions. Each illusion had a caption, for example, which circle is bigger? I then asked them a few questions. Were they able to answer all of the questions? If so, which ones? If not, why not? Did the illusions evoke any emotional response? Do they hate them? Love them? Did the illusions make them dizzy? Here are the two most telling questions and the graphed results:Question 1

Question 2 

For question one I asked if the people were able to answer the questions posed by the optical illusions. 40% said yes to all, another 40% said yes to at least 3, and 20% said no to all. In question two I asked for their responses to the illusions. 80% of people said they were able to figure them out no problem.

My data reports that people claimed to  see through the optical illusions, yet it also reported that about 80% of people got the answers to the yes or no questions in the captions wrong. The lines were parallel, the dots were the same size. 

From this, despite my discomfort with Paul Grobstein's statement, I can conclude that he is probably right. The brain takes what we see and assigns a familiar value to it, when it cannot identify what it is presented with immediately. I thought my results would be skewed because each illusion was labeled illusion, and many people have seen these illusions before. While that was the case, people still relied on what their brain's told them they were seeing, which was wrong. As we continue to simply assign familiar values to the wide world around us, my question is, what are we missing? What do we pass over simply as a result of human error, and our inability to comprehend? We pride ourselves as the species with the ability to think, analyze and create, yet, in that capacity we are still very limited.