One scientist at least seems to think so. Assistant professor Mark Changizi, from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, suggests that those annoying optical illusions that your friends send you through mass-emails, are nothing but your eyes trying to predict the future.

Now no-one is suggesting anything paranormal here, but rather an ability we have gotten through evolution, to theorize as to what would happen in the near future, given what we are seeing now. This would also explain reflex moves such as quickly ducking out of the way of a fastball. Take for example the picture on the left, there you have a big dot and lines radiating from it, which kind of looks as if you were traveling at high speed through a tunnel or towards something. The vertical red lines appear to bend a little bit if you look in the middle, as the brain is predicting what it expects to happen next in this scene (if we were in fact moving). These “premonitions” help compensate for delays caused by neurons traveling from the eye to the brain (one tenth of a second), because by the time the brain has received the information, the situation has already changed, so this guess gives us an approximation of what the situation might look like now, helping us to make the right reactions. I’ll forever look at optical illusions in another light now, if I’m bothered to look at them at all that is.

If you’re interested in reading more about this, and how the professor has categorized various optical illusions into a periodic table of sorts, i recommend the press release.