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Optical illusions are more than just magic tricks for the eyes — they’re a fascinating peek into the mysterious workings of the brain. At their core, these illusions are about how we interpret visual information: Our eyes take in light and send signals to the brain, but sometimes these signals get mixed up, leading to perceptions that don’t align with reality. Some optical illusions use contrast, perspective, and light refraction to deceive the brain; others work on a more complex cognitive level, tapping into the subconscious mind.

Aside from being fun, optical illusions also serve a practical purpose. While the brain uses more than 50% of its cortex for visual processing, the exact mechanisms of how we perceive our sensory input remain a mystery. Optical illusions can help us understand how we see the world, but they also demonstrate the power of the human mind — including just how easily it can be deceived. Here, we delve into the secrets behind five popular optical illusions.

Magic Eye

Magic Eye images are perhaps some of the most well-known optical illusions, having spawned a pop culture craze when engineer Tom Baccei and 3D artist Cheri Smith debuted them in the 1990s. While they may first appear like nothing more than colorful static, each mosaic-like picture conceals a 3D image. 

The secret to seeing the hidden image lies in the repeating patterns. Each eye picks up slightly different parts of the pattern, so the key is for viewers to relax their eyes until they see double vision, by focusing on the image while attempting to look “through” it. This allows the brain to merge the different signals, creating the perception of a 3D image, not unlike how the brain gauges depth in the real world.

Magic Eye illusions are officially known as autostereograms — a fancy name for 3D images hidden within 2D graphics. To create a Magic Eye image, designers first choose a shape and render it in grayscale, with the lighter areas reading as closer and the darker areas reading as farther away. Next, they cover the initial shape with a colorful repetitive pattern. Specially designed computer software mixes the pattern with the gray shape, adjusting the pattern’s spacing to highlight how close or far away different parts of the shape are. When you look at it the right way, allowing your eyes to relax, your brain uses the pattern’s depth clues to reveal the hidden 3D image.

Checker Shadow Illusion

In the checker shadow illusion, two labeled squares among a gray-and-white checkered pattern appear to be wildly different shades of gray — only they’re not. There’s an explanation for this astounding phenomenon: While both squares emit the same light, the brain uses its past experience with shadows to determine that the square marked B, in the shadow of the checker, must be lighter than A — a square that is also, conveniently, surrounded by contrasting  lighter-colored squares. 

The checker shadow illusion was created by neuroscientist and vision science professor Edward H. Adelson in 1995. While human vision has been compared to a camera, the brain doesn’t actually measure light the same way a camera does. Instead, it guesses what we see based on what it’s learned from the past — a clever reminder that context, not just raw sensory data, plays a large part in what we see.

Rotating Snakes

Seeing motion where there is none is a rather disorienting visual trick, and  “rotating snakes,” one version of the peripheral drift illusion, perfectly exemplifies this. Created by Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka in 2003, the image itself is static, but a quick glance appears to cause the colorful circles to spontaneously spin in a slow, mesmerizing swirl. Yet if you pick and stare at just one single spot, the “motion” ceases. What gives? 

Research suggests that our visual systems are wired to detect motion even when there is none. When we look at repeating, asymmetric patterns such as the ones in the rotating snakes illusion, our brains interpret the shifting contrasts as cues for motion. This triggers the type of neural activity that typically occurs when we observe actual movement. Essentially, through contrast and light, it tricks our brains into thinking there’s motion by mimicking the neural signals associated with seeing something move. 

My Wife and My Mother-in-Law

The image known as “My Wife and Mother-in-Law” is a famous example of how our brains can interpret the same ambiguous image in multiple ways. At first glance, you may see an image of a hunched-up older woman with a large nose and a kerchief on her head — but on second glance, an elegant younger woman with a veil and chin angled away from the viewer emerges (or vice versa). There have been a few different versions of this popular illusion; though it first appeared on a German postcard in 1888, the most popular version was adapted by American cartoonist William Ely Hill for a humor magazine called Puck in 1915. 

Research has suggested that the image you see first, or most easily, may depend on your age. Younger participants in one study tended to see the “wife” (or younger woman) first, while older participants saw the “mother-in-law” (or older woman). It’s believed this can be chalked up to initial subconscious interpretation of an image according to one’s personal age-based biases. This serves as yet more proof that our perception of reality is strongly influenced by context.

Ames Room

At first glance, an Ames room looks like any ordinary rectangular space. Step inside one, though, and everything suddenly feels off. People standing in opposite corners appear comically different in size — one towering, the other tiny. Ames rooms are built with skewed walls, floors, and ceilings that create a trapezoidal shape; the unexpected size discrepancies are a trick of forced depth perception. 

Typically, an Ames room is viewed through a small peephole or from a specific viewing angle. This forces the brain to receive only one perspective on the scene, significantly reducing depth cues from the other eye. As a result, the distorted shape of the room is obscured, and the brain perceives the scene as if the objects inside are changing size.

The Ames room was first developed in 1946 by American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. while exploring how experience affects perception. It’s since become an iconic fixture of amusement parks and even in pop culture — famous films such as 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and TheLord of the Rings trilogy have employed it to create deceptive visual dynamics, specifically to make certain characters appear much smaller than others.

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Since its creation in the 1930s, Scrabble has grown into a staple of family game nights and the source of spirited competitions around the world. In fact, according to Mattel, more than 165 million copies of the game have been sold in 120 countries since 1948. 

Each game of Scrabble depends not only on your lexical knowledge but also the luck of the draw; sometimes you’ll grab the perfect tiles to play on a triple word score, while other times you’re left holding five Es and two Os with no idea how to use them. Not only is Scrabble known for providing hours of family fun, but its history is also full of fascinating tidbits that only add to its mystique.  Here’s a look at some of the most spellbinding facts about this classic spelling game.

Scrabble Wasn’t Always Called “Scrabble”

During the Great Depression, architect Alfred M. Butts, like many other Americans, found himself unemployed and with some extra free time. He decided that creating a new game could provide a helpful distraction from the bleak economy. In 1931, he wrote a “Study of Games,” an essay analyzing the popularity of three distinct types of games: board games, number games, and letter/word games. 

In this treatise, Butts suggested the proper way to play word games was “not with a jumble of letters but with a mixture so proportioned that the individual letters will occur in the same frequency as they do in normal word formation.” This idea was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” a short story in which a character solves a cipher based on the popularity of English letters.

As a lover of crossword puzzles, Butts sought to create a similar game that incorporated his theories about letter frequency. He first developed Lexiko, a game wherein players selected nine random letter tiles to form words. Using his architectural knowledge, he manufactured each of the 100 tiles by hand. 

By August 1934, however, Butts had only sold 84 sets of Lexiko for a net loss of $20.43 (around $480 today). He tinkered with the rules and came up with a new variant called Cross-Cross Words, in which each letter was assigned a point value and each player’s hand decreased from nine to seven. Much like Lekixo, Criss-Cross Words failed to attract interest from any major manufacturer. Fortunately, Butts’ luck was about to change.

Macy’s Helped Popularize Scrabble

While things initially looked bleak for Butts’ word game, that all changed in 1947, when a man named James Brunot reached out to buy the rights. Butts obliged in exchange for royalties, and Brunot got to work on making a few changes. He adjusted the rules ever so slightly, implementing a 50-point bonus for playing all seven tiles in your hand at once, and he also changed the colors of the board to be more reminiscent of those we know today. Brunot finally renamed the game “Scrabble” — a word meaning “to scratch or scrape” according to Dictionary.com — which Brunot chose “out of thin air largely because it was a name that had never been copyrighted,” as the Los Angeles Times reports.

Brunot and his friends began working out of an abandoned Connecticut schoolhouse to produce 12 Scrabble boards every hour. Yet the team only managed to sell around 200 sets per week, resulting in an overall financial loss. Then, according to an unconfirmed but widely believed legend, Brunot got the break of a lifetime in 1952. 

In the book Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, the author details a story in which then-Macy’s chairman Jack I. Straus played a game of Scrabble while on vacation. Straus was delighted by the game and also upset to learn it wasn’t stocked at Macy’s flagship store in New York City. Upon his return from vacation, Straus placed a massive Scrabble order, which triggered other retailers to do the same. In a fortunate turn of events, Brunot found himself producing thousands of Scrabble sets each week. More than one million copies of Scrabble were sold in 1953, and 3.8 million sold the following year.

The Longest Scrabble Word Can Score You More Than 1,700 Points

The goal of Scrabble is to net the highest score possible. Amateurs often surpass 100 points per game, while experts average between 330 and 450 points. But in theory, it’s possible to score more than 1,700 points with a single word, though that requires a highly unlikely set of circumstances. The word in question is “Oxyphenbutazone,” the name of an anti-inflammatory drug. As the word is 15 letters long, it’s impossible to have all those tiles in your initial seven-tile hand. This means not only does it require drawing the right set of letters, but also already having placed certain tiles on the board in just the right way.

Scrabble aficionado Dan Stock calculated that playing “OXYPHENBUTAZONE” could score you 1,778 points. According to his strategy, you’d need to be holding the tiles O, Y, P, B, A, Z, and E. You’d also need to have already placed eight specific tiles on certain squares on a standard 15 x 15 Scrabble board: X, H, E, N, U, T, O, and N. The following words also would need to be strategically placed on the board: “PACIFYING,” “ELKS,” “REINTERVIEWED,” “RAINWASHING,” “MELIORATIVE,” “ARFS,” and “JACULATING.”

If you managed to recreate that exact scenario, “OXYPHENBUTAZONE” would score you 1,458 points on its own (thanks to all the word score bonuses). You’d also get 50 points for playing your entire hand and 270 points from creating seven new words running from left to right: “OPACIFYING,” “YELKS,” “PREINTERVIEWED,” “BRAINWASHING,” “AMELIORATIVE,” “ZARFS,” and “EJACULATING.” Although Stock was the first person to calculate this strategy, there have been more recent proposals that can theoretically score you as many as 1,784 or 1,786 points with the right placement of “OXYPHENBUTAZONE.” However, these specific circumstances needed for those high scores have never arisen in actual gameplay to anyone’s knowledge.

There Are More Than 280,000 Words in the Collins Scrabble Dictionary

Collins is the producer of Official SCRABBLE Words — a book used by English-language Scrabble players to determine which words are legal in competitive play. Nearly 2,000 new words were added in 2024, marking the first major update since the 2020 edition, which contained 279,073 words. These newer additions include slang words such as “yeet,” culinary terms such as “birria,” and gaming lingo such as “esport.” This updated version of Official SCRABBLE Words has served as the gold standard for tournaments since  January 1, 2025.

While the Collins Scrabble dictionary remains the official source for tournament play, Hasbro — the current manufacturer of Scrabble — works with Merriam-Webster to produce The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. This text is comparatively limited in what words are considered legal, as there are a little more than 100,000 words included. This book was most recently updated in 2022, with the addition of 500 new words including shorthand terms such as “guac” and playful verbs such as “adulting.”

Scrabble Been Turned Into Multiple TV Shows

Starting in 1984, Scrabble was adapted from the dining room table to the small screen in the form of a game show hosted by Chuck Woolery. The TV version revised the board game slightly: Instead of playing words from your hand, the game was played more like a crossword puzzle. In round one, two contestants were given a punny crossword-style clue and a random letter to build on to guess the word. The winner advanced to the Sprint Round, where players guessed words against a clock. This original version of Scrabble earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1988 and was briefly revived in 1993 with Woolery reprising his role as host.

A new Scrabble TV show debuted on the CW Network on October 3, 2024, with Raven-Symoné as host. Unlike the 1980s version, this adaptation adheres a bit more closely to the actual rules of Scrabble. In the first round, contestants are tasked with solving anagrams based on a clue. But in the second round, players alternate making actual Scrabble moves as you would in the board game. The difference here, however, is that both contestants use the same set of tiles to make those words. The final round involves the most traditional Scrabble gameplay, where contestants play their personal hand of tiles in hopes of surpassing 200 points to win.

Competitive Scrabble Has Had Some Major Cheating Scandals

The world of competitive Scrabble prides itself on maintaining the integrity of the game, but some participants have let the pressure drive them to cheating. One of the first major accusations of competitive cheating came during the 2011 World Scrabble Championships, where a player was nearly strip-searched to find a missing “G” tile before authorities concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to take things that far. One year later, a player was found to have been concealing blank tiles for use at opportune times. After being confronted, the player admitted to stealing blank tiles and was subsequently ejected from the competition.

In 2017, the competitive Scrabble world was rocked yet again when Allan Simmons, the former U.K. national champion and coauthor of Official Scrabble Words, was banned from competitive play for three years amid accusations of cheating. Multiple competitors claim they saw Simmons peeking into the bag and returning less helpful tiles in exchange for ones that were more valuable. Simmons denied any wrongdoing, but the ban still held.