FOLLOW MY FINGER: No matter from which direction you look at this image, the finger appears to be pointed directly at you.
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This is the third article in the Mind Matters series on the neuroscience behind visual illusions.
The eyes are the windows to the soul. This fact is why we ask people to look us in the eye and tell us the truth. Or why we get worried when someone gives us the evil eye or has a wandering eye. Our everyday language is full of expressions that refer to where people around us are looking. Particularly if they happen to be looking in our direction.
As social primates, humans are very interested in determining the direction of gaze of other humans. It’s important for evaluating their intentions, and critical for forming bonds and negotiating relationships. Lovers stare for long stretches into each other’s eyes, and infants focus intently on the eyes of their parents. Very young babies look at simple representations of faces (such as smileys) for longer than they look at similar cartoonish faces in which the eyes and other features have been scrambled.
In this slide show, we’re going to investigate a series of illusions that take advantage of the way the brain processes eyes and gaze. It turns out that it’s fairly easy to trick us into thinking that someone is looking somewhere else, or that Albert Einstein is actually Marilyn Monroe.
Mind Matters is edited by Jonah Lehrer the science writer behind the blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
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7 Comments
Add CommentJust curious, but what if the photo had included cleavage ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI allegedly have "Asperger's syndrome," an autism-like mental state. Anyhow, I was unable to see all your eye-based optical illusions, or if I did they were very weak and unimpressive. But I have no trouble being impressed by all kinds of other interesting optical illusions elsewhere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI took a picture of this hybrid image on my iphone. The camera roll or the thumb nail images show marilyn monroe whereas when you make the image bigger it turns up as Einstein. I guess that is another way to see this illusion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-Vinod
Because of limited space in my computer room, I'm unable to step far enough away from the image to create the illusion. However, I've got a plugin for firefox that allows me to resize images and as vinod pointed out, resizing the image has the same effect as changing your distance from it. This is likely due to the fact that the detail is lost when the images is shrunk and only the course detail remains.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI found I had to take off my eyeglasses (for myopia) in order to see the illusions without having to back out of the room. They are fantastic when I am not wearing my corrective lenses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe presentation should be in pps formate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany web browsers (like Firefox that I am using now but also I.E. & Chrome...) have a zoom function (often the scroll wheel, sometimes with Ctrl pressed) Which allow you to sit comfortably in front of your screen while you zoom the illusion images in and out - who wants to have to gt up out of their chairs anyway!
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