Can You Unsee the Lie? Optical Illusions, Cultural Narcissism, and the Art of Looking Again
Monday, May 19, 2025.
We live in the age of curated perception. Instagram filters, clickbait headlines, “vibes.”
It’s all illusion, and we’re all falling for it.
So here’s the question: if you can train your brain to unsee an optical illusion—can you train it to unsee the culture that raised you to fall for it?
Science now says: sort of (PsyPost, 2024).
The Orange Circle and the Lie of Context
Consider the Ebbinghaus illusion: two identical orange circles, one surrounded by large gray blobs, the other by small ones. The one with the smaller neighbors looks bigger (Gheorghiu et al., 2021).
You’re not broken. Your brain is just doing its job—using context to help interpret ambiguous data.
But what if that “context” is itself warped?
What if the brain isn't just tricked by shapes, but also by stories?
“I must be exceptional because everyone around me is less accomplished.”
“Our way of life is the baseline. Everyone else is extreme.”
“My pain matters more than yours. Just look at my feed.”
In a culture addicted to comparison, context becomes propaganda. The illusion becomes ideology. And you’re the orange circle, inflated or diminished by the company you keep—or the algorithm that chooses that company for you.
Who Falls for Illusions? It Depends
Turns out some people are more susceptible than others. Studies show:
Women are more affected than men—possibly because they pay more attention to context (Witkin et al., 1962).
Young Children don’t see the illusion at all. At age five, the circles just look like… circles. No story. No agenda.
Autistic Folks and People with Schizophrenia. Also less likely to be fooled. They’re focused more on the object itself than its surroundings (Kapoula & Lestocart, 2006).
Japanese Adults are more susceptible than British ones. Holistic culture meets compact urban design—paying attention to context is a survival trait in Tokyo. Not so much in a Yorkshire village (Henrich et al., 2010).
The Himba of Namibia. Barely affected. They live in wide open spaces where relative size doesn’t matter much. Context, in a visual sense, isn’t a life-or-death calculation (Henrich et al., 2010).
So perception is personal. But it’s also political. It’s shaped by the stories, habits, and environments that raise us.
Can We Train Ourselves to Unsee?
Up until recently, researchers thought you couldn’t opt out of illusions. That the brain would simply do its interpretive dance whether you asked it to or not.
But then came the radiologists—those monks of the modern medical monastery, trained to stare at pixelated human interiors for years. Researchers found these specialists were better at seeing through illusions (The Conversation, 2024). They weren’t immune, but they were less fooled.
Radiologists, it turns out, aren’t born with superior perception. They develop it. Through repetition, feedback, and precision, they retrain their brains to ignore misleading context.
Now let’s ask the real question: If we can learn to see through visual illusions, can we learn to see through cultural ones?
Culture as Optical Illusion
Cultural Narcissism is the Instagram filter applied to reality. It highlights contrast, erases flaws, and centers the self in every frame.
It tells us:
Your feelings are the most important metric.
If you’re not winning, someone must be cheating.
The world owes you a custom-designed experience—curated, frictionless, and flattering.
And like the Ebbinghaus illusion, it’s so seamless we don’t even notice it’s a trick.
Until we try to live a real life. Have a real relationship. Raise a real child. And suddenly reality doesn’t obey the script.
Because real life isn’t optimized for self-esteem. It’s optimized for complexity.
How the Brain Actually Works
From a neuroscientific perspective, perception isn’t a passive reception of information.
It’s apparently a predictive proces as well. The brain is constantly guessing what it’s about to see, based on prior experience, cultural knowledge, and environmental cues (Gheorghiu et al., 2021).
What you see isn’t what’s there. It’s what your brain expects to be there.
This is why Japanese adults—raised in high-context, interdependent societies—see illusions more strongly. And why the Himba—who live in a visual world stripped of misleading cues—don’t. Their brains weren’t trained to expect distortion.
Perception, then, is a form of socialization.
Which means Cultural Narcissism—this conviction that the self is central and deserving of constant affirmation—isn’t just a moral failing. It’s a visual habit. A trained gaze.
Radiology for the Mind
So how do we train ourselves to see past illusions—not just optical ones, but emotional and cultural ones?
The radiologists give us a roadmap:
Disconfirmation Practice – Repeated exposure to people, ideas, and feelings that contradict your expectations—and require recalibration.
Slow Cognition – Systems (like literature, conversation, therapy) that resist snap judgment and reward deeper inquiry.
Shared Attention – Learning to see not just for yourself, but with others. Like radiologists comparing scans, we must develop collective discernment.
A Culture of Humility – One that rewards being corrigible, rather than being “right.” (We built social media to reward the opposite.)
And maybe we begin by naming the illusion: not just that we’re better or worse than others—but that we are alone in the frame at all.
Final Exam: Reality, Without the Filter
No, you can’t just “decide” to see things clearly.
But you can practice. You can become suspicious of easy stories, soft lighting, and TikTok therapy accounts that start with “If your partner does this ONE thing…”
You can learn to ask:
“What’s actually here? And what am I bringing to the image?”
It’s slow work. But so is learning to read a CT scan. And, in the end, both might save lives.
Maybe this is the beginning of a new kind of visual literacy.
One where the question is no longer, “What do you see?”but, “What are you trained to ignore?”
Because maybe the greatest illusion of all is the one we were raised inside.
And maybe real seeing—real attention—isn't something you're born with.
Maybe it's something you practice.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
;REFERENCES
Gheorghiu, V. A., Kingdom, F. A. A., & Petkov, N. (2021). Perception and the Ebbinghaus illusion: A context-driven distortion. Vision Research, 187, 36–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2021.05.001
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
Kapoula, Z., & Lestocart, C. (2006). Perception of the Ebbinghaus illusion in schizophrenia: A failure of size constancy? Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 11(4), 417–436. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546800500364932
PsyPost. (2024, May). Can you train your brain to unsee optical illusions? Scientists think so. https://www.psypost.org/2024/05/can-you-train-your-brain-to-unsee-optical-illusions-scientists-think-so-21345
The Conversation. (2024, May). This optical illusion tricks almost everyone — but radiologists can be trained to see through it. https://theconversation.com/this-optical-illusion-tricks-almost-everyone-but-radiologists-can-be-trained-to-see-through-it-226756
Witkin, H. A., Dyk, R. B., Faterson, H. F., Goodenough, D. R., & Karp, S. A. (1962). Psychological differentiation: Studies of development. Wiley.