Mindblowing optical illusion of a world-famous landmark leaves viewers confused – can you figure out the answer?

THIS mindblowing optical illusion of a famous landmark has left viewers confused.

Are you able to figure out why the side by side images appear different?

2007 Kingdom, Yoonessi & Gheorghiu/Best Illusion of The Year Contest

Mindblowing optical illusion of the world-famous Leaning Tower of Pisa leaves viewers confused[/caption]

Called the ‘Leaning Tower Illusion’ the images you see are of one of the most famous historical landmarks in the world – the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.

The illusion’s name is a pun on ‘Leaning Tower,’ because it was first noticed in a pair of identical images of the Italian landmark. It also won the Best Illusion of the Year contest in 2007.

When compared side by side, one of the images appears to lean more than the other, but they are, in fact, identical pictures.

The illusion doesn’t just work for the Pisa building, but for works any image of a receding tower, as well as with other receding objects. I

It’s actually best described as a visual, not optical illusion, because the ‘trick’ is in the mind not the light, according to Scholarpedia.org

The reason for the illusion is the phenomenon in which an image of a tower viewed from below appears lopsided when placed next to an identical copy of itself. 

If you were to cover up one of the images and look at the other, both images are identical, leaning at the same angle.

In the case of this visual, the mind is tricked by its own mechanism for constructing a mental three-dimensional image from a flat two-dimensional image.

Objects that we see are imaged onto the retinae at the back of our eyes, then encoded into electrical signals that are sent to the brain for further analysis.

As Scholarpedia explains, because our retinae are surfaces, the images cast upon them are in perspective. The world gets projected onto the retinae and information about the third dimension is lost.

The brain then reconstructs the third dimension from the image on the retina, allowing us to experience a convincing 3D world.

When two receding towers are in the same image, they they tend to look as though they converge, but when the image is placed side by side, the mind tends to see the images as diverging, as in the ‘Leaning Tower Illusion’.