![\"1\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2016\/07\/1.png\")
Which line is longer?<\/p>\nWhich line is longer?<\/p>\n
Most people who grow up\u00a0in industrialized environments will be at least a little bit tricked by this optical illusion, called the M\u00fcller-Lyer illusion. At first look, it may seem as if the line on the left\u00a0is shorter than the line on the right. In fact, if you look closely and carefully, you can probably see that both lines are the same length.<\/p>\n Some psychologists theorize<\/a>\u00a0that susceptibility to this illusion is due to a strongly \u201ccarpentered\u201d environment, one built by humans with the help of machines. Such environments are made mostly of straight lines and right angles. If\u00a0this geometry is all around us all the time, our brains get very good at interpreting these environments.<\/p>\n That advantage, though, is a disadvantage when looking at the M\u00fcller-Lyer lines because our brain learns to associate angles like the one on the right\u00a0with distance and ones like the one on the left\u00a0with closeness. Then, it alters our perception of their height to adjust for perceived space.<\/p>\n Bear with me.<\/p>\n Consider my\u00a0drawing of a room and hallway below. You can see that the corner\u00a0closest to us (A) has\u00a0lines like the point of an arrow on both ends (like the line on the left\u00a0above), while\u00a0the one further\u00a0away (B) has lines like the rear of an arrow on both sides (like the line on the right). Our brain gets so used to inferring distance when it sees these angles, it assumes that any line\u00a0with angles\u00a0like B appears inaccurately short because it’s far away.\u00a0That\u2019s how the illusion tricks our brain.<\/p>\n People who don\u2019t grow up in a carpentered environments, though\u2014hunter gatherers and other groups who spend most of their time in nature and other uncarpentered environments\u2014don\u2019t have brains adjusted to understanding straight lines and angles, so the illusion doesn\u2019t work on them.<\/p>\n The\u00a0M\u00fcller-Lyer illusion, then, is a great example of how our brains get acculturated in ways that shape even simple and straightforward\u00a0perception tasks.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/a><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Which line is longer? Most people who grow up\u00a0in industrialized environments will be at least a little bit tricked by this optical illusion, called the M\u00fcller-Lyer illusion. At first look, it may seem as if the line on the left\u00a0is shorter than the line on the right. In fact, if you look closely and carefully, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":69648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[664,15],"class_list":["post-69233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biology","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2016\/12\/3-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69233"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69638,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69233\/revisions\/69638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"20160806_223632\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2016\/08\/20160806_223632.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n