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Illusions

Using the activities

This resource has fourteen separate groups of illusions. Most are visual illusions but we have also included fun activities using other senses. Illusions are an incredible tool for education — entertaining, thought-provoking, relevant and versatile not to mention easy and inexpensive. There isn’t another science topic quite like this. We could go on all day about why illusions are great for educators but the best reason of all is that kids love them.

We hope you do too!

The activities

1. Which is which, this or that?
   Ambiguity and instability in images
2. Picture this
   Landscapes, background and camouflage
3. Delayed Telecasts
   After-effects in colour and black and white
4. Ghost Busters
   Movement, colours and shapes that aren't really there
5. Mission Impossible
   Impossible figures, 3D interpretations
6. The Distorted Top Ten
   Mind-tricks with shapes, colours, sizes and patterns
7. Far and Away
   Depth perception and judging distance
8. Atten-shun!
   Visual organisation and the role of visual attention
9. Word perfect
   Language illusions
10. Taste Test
    Sensory illusions with the taste buds
11. The Real Deal
    Taste and smell illusions
12. Listen Up
    Sound illusions
13. Hand Made Illusions
    Do illusions translate from one sense to another?
14. Heavy, Man
    Power of past experience

Links to the Curriculum Framework

• Science (Life & Living, Energy and Change)
• Maths (Working Mathematically, Space, Measurement, Valuing Mathematics)
• The Arts (Art Ideas, Art Skills and Processes, Art Responses, Arts in Society)
• Technology and Enterprise (The Technology Process, Materials, Systems, Technology in Society)
• Health and Physical Education (Knowledge and Understandings, Skills for Physical Activity)

Links to the Upper School Curriculum

• Physics (Sight and Light, Sound Waves)
• Human Biology (Nerves and Hormonal Control)
• Art and Design (Visual Inquiry)
• Technical Drawing (Pictorial Drawing - Perspective, Dimensioning)
• Mathematics (Modelling with Mathematics - In Three Dimensions)

Brain research timeline

5000 (years ago)

Ancient civilisations typically thought the brain was of no importance. Ancient Egyptians didn’t bother to preserve brains in corpses about to be mummified – they simply sucked the dead brain tissue out through the corpses’ nostrils!

3700

The first known written reference to the brain was made.

2500

Hippocrates used his studies of people with epilepsy as the basis for his belief that human intelligence was located in the head, but this was widely disregarded.

2400

Aristotle aid that the brain's inability to feel pain meant that it must only serve to cool the blood and couldn't possibly be the “thinking organ”.

1700

Galen theorised that the human soul was located in the liquid which surrounds the brain, the cerebrospinal final, but not in the brain tissue.

130

Broca discovered that different parts of the had specific functions.

100

Cajal recognised the importance of the connections between neurons

80

The air encephalography technique was developed, which produced the first useful brain X-rays.

70

Berger developed the first electroencephally machine or EEG - which tracks the electric signals inside the brain.

50

Luria mapped areas of the brain's outer cortex according to their special responsibilities.