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The optical illusions in these 19 perfectly-timed photos will make you look twice

Kelly Dickerson

2016-01-21T16:11:39Z

optical illusions

The human brain is surprisingly easy to trick.

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Light can bend and warp our perspective of things, colors can appear completely different from one moment to the next (remember "the dress"?), and sometimes our brains can't figure out the true shapes and sizes of objects.

These 19 perfectly-timed photos will remind you human perspective isn't foolproof, and sometimes the world isn't the way it seems.

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It looks like Phillies player Ben Francisco's head is missing as he reacts to being hit in the head by a pitch from Cincinnati Reds player Logan Ondrusek during a playoffs game in 2010.

optical illusions

Athletes exercise on the edge of what appears to be a giant cavern. It's actually one of the world's largest 3D paintings at Canary Wharf in London. The painting by British artist Joe Hill is 12,000 square feet.

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We wish this half horse, half waffle truck was real. It's actually just a well-timed shot as two horses pass behind a truck during celebrations for the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium on June 18, 2015.

optical illusions

France's Mathieu Valbuena (right) is actually 5 foot 6 inches, but he's leaning back in this action shot and appears dwarfed in comparison to Belgium's Marouane Fellaini (left) and Vincent Kompany (center) who are both 6 foot 4 inches.

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German street artist Johan Lorbeer performs "Tarzan. Standing Leg Still Life Performance" in Bilbao on August 20, 2011. He's suspended in mid air with one hand resting on the wall.

optical illusions

It looks like this man's head was replaced with a soccer ball when the photographer snapped the picture at exactly the right moment as he practiced dribbling the ball in a park in northeast India.

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Light bending through water makes these swimmers in the Havana sea look like bodies with detached heads.

Weirdest Reuters Photos 2015 — People swim at the sea in Havana, April 28, 2015. On Sunday, Cuba registered a temperature of 39.7 degrees Celsius, 0.1 degrees less than the island's historic record, according to Jose Rubiera, Director of the National Forecast Center of the Institute of Meteorology of Cuba. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

These Nissan vehicles parked in rows at the company's factory in Yokosuka, Japan look like a computer graphics glitch.

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Chinese artist Liu Bolin blended himself into the background of a shelf of comic books as part of a series of performances in Caracas. Can you spot him?

optical illusions

Nope, this isn't a human-dog hybrid. It's a woman competing with her Great Dane at the Crufts dog show in Birmingham.

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This visitor at the Hong Kong Science Museum looks like he stole Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. It's actually just a clever mirror trick at the "Mirrors of Invisibility" exhibit.

optical illusions

It's a bird! It's a plane! Close — it's actually a radio-controlled Superman plane. The photo was taken when Designer Otto Dieffenbach tested the plane in San Diego, California on June 27, 2013.

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Nope, this isn't a new breed of dachshund. It's just a perfectly timed photograph of two Eurasier dogs behind a tree.

optical illusions

This security guard had some fun while inspecting the back of a self-portrait by artists Ron Mueck on display at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland.

optical illusions

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The lack of any foreground in this shot makes it look like this man is walking across the sky. He's actually leaping into the Dnipro river in Kiev.

optical illusions

This brave man stands in the 'Step into the Void' installation at the Aiguille du Midi mountain peak above Chamonix, in the French Alps. That's a 1,000-meter drop.

optical illusions

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This clever design makes shoppers using the escalator at a shopping center in Singapore look like tiny elves.

optical illusions

It looks like this tower is floating in the clouds, but actually the image was just taken from a snow stack that piled up near the Fernsehturm television tower in Berlin on February 3, 2011.

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This visitor looks like an ant compared to the gigantic sculpture created by artist Robert Therrien.

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