Shocking illusion – Pretty girls turn horrific!

I just love finding out new ways for our minds and senses to fool us, and especially new kinds of visual illusions like this beauty…

This was just recently discovered, an effect that makes rapidly displayed faces on either side of the video look like hideous monsters when your vision is focused on the central crosshairs.

Mind you, none of these faces has been altered from the original source — They’re all normal looking faces — The effect is dependent upon not focusing on them while they’re being flashed.

See the links below for further information and this video’s source…

Courtesy of TangenCognitionLab

It’s a new scientific finding called the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect”. You can read more about it here

http://mbthompson.com/research

and here

http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p6968

Tangen, J. M., Murphy, S., & Thompson, M. B. (in press). Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces. Perception advance online publication, doi:10.1068/p6968.

Thanks to http://3d.sk for the faces

The Eyes Say One Thing, The Brain Says Another…

This is a cute little one, a figure with straight lines that seen together look warped. Aside from being highly conducive to eyestrain, it’s not as easy to visualize in a different way like yesterday’s Penrose Staircase. It’s a good example of how the eyes and brain can contradict one another when visual stimuli conflict with visual processing when looking at the right pattern of lines and dots.

The Impossible Staircase…

…or is it? Have fun wracking your brain on this one. It’s an illusion invented, my sources tell me, by Lionel and Roger Penrose, mathematician, physicist, and also well-known among skeptics as a proponent of the idea of quantum neurobiology.

It was depicted by M. C. Escher in 1961, but earlier conceived by Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd, though neither Escher nor either Penrose are thought to have known it.

This is a good illustration of how our own senses can fool us, and a useful perceptual example of why direct experience is not as consistently reliable as pseudoscience advocates would have us believe.

(Last Update 2011/1/11, 4:30, Crediting Corrections)

Richard Wiseman — The skull

This is a nice little video conjuring illusion by psychologist Dick Wiseman of “Quirkology” fame, that is neither edited nor makes use of any CGI effects. I’d recommend stopping the video just after the trick to try to figure out how he did it yourself, then restarting it for the reveal afterward to test your guess. You’ll be surprised how simple it turns out to be. Sheer brilliance, Prof. Wiseman, good show!

Mental Acid – Optical Illusion (1:40 mins)

TreyCrll

This is an optical illusion that should make your vision temporarily blurey and or wavy, it’s pretty Kewl.