Question: How does our brain turn the image we inishally see, through our Retina, the other way, when we don't know we are doing it.

Rosie Coates answered on 20 Mar 2014:

Hi @emanresu,

Another good question from you! You are absolutely right- when an image is focused on the retina it is upside down. Your brain processes these images using the visual cortex and a something called perceptual adaptation. This lets us see the world the right way up.

One scientist, George Malcolm Stratton, was a psychologist working in the 1890s. He did a ground breaking experiment to reveal this perceptual adaptation for the first time. He wore a pair of glasses that used mirrors to turn the images we see back upside down, like they are when they are made on our retinas. When he wore the glasses for three days he saw the images upside down- his brain didn’t compensate for the mirrors. When he wore the glasses for eight days however, on the fifth day he saw the images the right way up again. His brain had learned to compensate for the mirrors and put his world the right way up again. Amazing?!