10 April 2009

Warp your room (not your mind) with this awesome illusion

Via speigl.org via verylowsodium:

Instructions:
1. Stare at the image for 10 seconds
2. Look at something -- your hand, a book, your friend
3. Enjoy!

For more on illusions -- and the delight of our buggy minds -- see Al Seckel's 2004 TEDTalk >>

Posted by Matthew Trost | Permalink

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13 October 2008

Which direction is this woman spinning?

Can you reverse her direction of rotation?

Cognitive Daily at ScienceBlogs took a reader poll and found that two-thirds saw the silhouetted woman rotating clockwise. About the same number were able to reverse her direction.

Those who initially saw the woman rotating counter-clockwise found it easier to reverse her direction -- much as the Necker cube's orientation can be reversed at will. How did you fare? (Check out more illusions in TEDTalks by Al Seckel and Dan Dennett.)

Posted by Matthew Trost | Permalink

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21 September 2008

How easily we are fooled: The rotating grid illusion

Filmmaker and animator David O'Reilly (who came up with the concept for iHologram) has noticed an interesting property in this animated GIF:

He writes:

While working in 3D last year, I discovered this optical illusion: A large grid seen rotating at a certain speed will appear to group itself into smaller grids, spinning independently.

See O'Reilly's website for more examples (and his theory on why this happens).

For more optical illusions, watch Al Seckel's TEDTalk on how easily we are fooled; or Dan Dennett's talk on our gullible minds. As Dennett says, we need to understand how easily we are fooled, in order to understand the nature of consciousness itself.

Posted by Emily McManus | Permalink

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20 April 2007

Al Seckel on TED.com

Al Seckel, a cognitive neuroscientist, explores the perceptual illusions that fool our brains. Loads of eye tricks help him prove that not only are we easily fooled, we kind of like it.

Read the transcript >>

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