If you look down at the photo below, the baby’s face will leap right out at you.
The images show how the brain ‘fills in’ the gaps in visual data, according to University of Cardiff and Cambridge researchers - closely related to why we hallucinate, and to psychotic symptoms.
The researchers found that out of 18 volunteers, people with early stages of psychosis were actually BETTER at resolving black-and-white images such as the baby.
People with psychotic symptoms often hallucinate, but the process has been poorly understood until now.
It might help to explain why we hallucinate - for instance, hearing sounds which aren’t there - as our brains are ‘filling in’ information to explain what is going on.
Professor Paul Fletcher of the University of Cambridge added: ‘Having a predictive brain is very useful – it makes us efficient and adept at creating a coherent picture of an ambiguous and complex world.
‘But it also means that we are not very far away from perceiving things that aren’t actually there, which is the definition of a hallucination.
‘In fact, in recent years we’ve come to realise that such altered perceptual experiences are by no means restricted to people with mental illness.
‘They are relatively common, in a milder form, across the entire population. Many of us will have heard or seen things that aren’t there.’
Can You See A Baby Here? You Might Be Psychotic
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I stared and stared...did not see it until I saw the bottom pic. How about you?
