Optical Illusions

I’ve always thought optical illusions were fun. There’s a great piece in the current Scientific American that gets into the neuroscience of illusion and while it may be kind of heavy reading, the examples are worth looking at.  Some of them will blow your mind, others are just funny.  But you can’t believe that you can’t make your mind resolve what you know is there vs. what you think you’re seeing.
Basically, an optical illusion is summed up nicely this way:

When we look at an illusion, we “see” something that does not match the physical reality of the world around us. Scientists take advantage of this discrepancy between perception and reality to gain insights into how our eyes and brains gather and interpret (or misinterpret) visual information.

Of course, anyone who has spent any time in business realizes that we’re surrounded by these things. Sometimes, they’re people – they look like one thing but when we get beyond what our mind is perceiving and focus on the pieces, it’s pretty obvious that the image we have is pretty distorted.  Companies can be the same way on a number of levels.  Their financial statements can look fine until you step back, look at the pieces and the footnotes, and realize that what you think you see isn’t what’s really there.

On another level, how companies present themselves and how they act often demonstrate the illusion.  How many times have you see smiling, helpful employees in ads only to deal with the reality of a snarky customer service rep when there’s a problem?  I don’t expect we’ll ever see an ad for low fares with all the surcharges in equally bold type, but that low fare is an optical illusion of another sort.

I think we need to keep optical illusions on the pages of  Scientific American and other journals and out of business.  They’re great fun to read about but not so much fun when we encounter them in the financial pages or while doing business.  What do you think?