50 Seriously Confusing Pics That Might Require A Double Take, As Shared On This Twitter Page

As far as I can remember, every capital city that I've visited had a place that promised to bend your mind - either with the help of optical illusions or forced perspective photography (a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is).

Not too far from the Bored Panda office in Vilnius, Lithuania, there's a tiny Museum of Illusions filled with upside-down rooms, illusions and whatnot to mess with visitors' heads. I wasn't exactly surprised to see that the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, Poland, had some weird perspective-warping rooms for Instagrammable pics, too. The same can be said about New York City, Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam and other metropolises where one can indulge in lighthearted activities for the brain.

Optical illusions and confusing-as-hell photos that make us squint, then, are not so different (the best of both worlds are currently being employed in an upcoming, surreal video game called "Viewfinder"). They both make our brains hurt in the most amusing way possible. And both make us ponder if what we see is actually real. Perhaps it's a way for our brains to tell us something Morphius-esque?

According to Mark Changizi, a neurobiologist and the author of 'Expressly Human: Decoding the Language of Emotion', an optical illusion is more than our perception being duped. In his "Perceiving the present" hypothesis, which he published in 2008, Changizi claims that they have an evolutionary purpose.

"Brains have evolved not to simply generate a perception of the scene that probably caused the stimulus that hits your eye, but instead to generate a perception of what that scene will be like in a tenth of a second," Changizi explained to Bored Panda in an email. "That way, by the time your brain has built a perception of the near future, that near future has arrived, and you'll have a perception of the... wait for it... present!"