In each of these optical illusions you see things that are--literally-- all in your mind.

In the first illusion, called the subjective contour effect, your brain "fills in" the gaps in the rectangle between four corners, creating completed lines where there are no lines at all. Your brain engages in this bit of creative fiction to help you make sense of what you're seeing. For example, if you were out in the woods hunting deer, you might first catch a partial glimpse of your prey through dense vegetation that blocked you from seeing the whole animal. But you'd know what you were seeing was a deer, and not a collection of disconnected shapes, because your brain synthesized the fragmented parts of the image into an integrated whole

The second illusion, sometimes called the neon effect, also is an example of your brain filling in gaps, but this time with colors. You perceive solid (albeit faint) color in the white spaces between the green lines because your brain, in attempt to help you see a whole vs. a collection of parts, compels you to see a solid whole where there actually are only disparate parts.

In the final illusion, your brain guesses-erroneously as it turns out-that spots wink in and out of existence. This scintillating grid illusion arises from neural artifacts in the way your brain estimates the brightness in between sharply contrasting shapes.

So why should we care about optical illusions?

Neuroscientists have discovered that optical illusions tell us a lot about the way the human brain perceives the business world: the brain doesn't passively-- and faithfully-- report what it sees. Rather our brains create reality on the fly, based upon educated guesses about what is probably out there. The reason is that it takes much less processing power, and burns many fewer calories, for the brain to crudely sketch out what it sees based on a few simple rules such as "shapes that appear fragmented usually aren't, so fill in the gaps", than it does for the brain to rigorously process and compute complete and accurate pictures. Such shortcuts not only conserve energy (our brains consume 20% of our daily calorie usage), but speed up decision making.

Your brain forms perception of the future in the same way it perceives the present; by sketching extrapolations and interpolations of what it does see, to flesh out what it doesn't see.

This means that if you're a business person, for example, you'll view your firm's future as an extrapolation of its past. And the more long-lived and successful your company, the more your brain will see a future that closely resembles the firm's history.

Unfortunately, the accelerating pace of change in the business world guarantees that the stable future you see is an illusion.

For instance, in the early 2000's when I was an Executive Vice President at Disney responsible for corporate R&D, the media business began to experience rapid transformations. Not only were new distribution channels, such as internet video, emerging for traditional media, but entirely new forms of media, such as social networks (e.g. Youtube), Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORGs) or location sensitive applications (e.g. Google Maps) were bursting on the scene every year or two. In this fast changing environment we could never predict what the future was going to be, but we were certain of what is was not going to be: like the past.

However, we knew we had a problem forming accurate visions of the future, because, as professional illusionists, we were acutely aware of the human brain's tendency to fill in the blanks with bad data. We realized that, left to their own devices, our brains would give us a faulty--overly conservative--vision of our future.

We solved this problem by developing time machines that let us travel to the future to see what was in store for us.

We didn't actually travel in time, of course, but we bought expensive super computers and other exotic technologies that we used to simulate media experiences of the future. We knew that Moore's law, which states that the cost of digital technology reduces by a factor of two every 18 months, would eventually make super computers cheap enough for consumer applications. Thus, we were able to discover experiences that would be killer apps five years into the future, when the magic of Moore's law would make our time machine experiences affordable. We developed the hit game, Toon Town Online using time machines. Our time machines also produced the hot-selling Pal Mickey location-sensitive toy that entertained theme park guests while they lined up to ride our attractions.

It almost doesn't matter what business you ‘re in, it's likely that that business will soon change. Thus, you should consider building a few time machines of your own. Although the exotic devices sound like science fiction, the profits they generated at Disney were no illusion.

Learn more about predicting the future with time machines at www.longfusebigbang.com