The 9th annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest took place today, Monday May 13th, in the Naples Philharmonic Hall in Florida. Jun Ono, Akiyasu Tomoeda and Kokichi Sugihara, a team of mathematicians and illusion creators from Meiji University in Japan, took first prize for their "Rotation generated by translation illusion"...
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afghan_girls_from_Ghazni_province.jpg Neuroscience can be lots of fun, but perhaps even more so when researchers study the brain’s Laughter Perception Network...
Ed. Note: This blog post originally appeared on Sleights of Mind. The illusion of the week is an interesting twist on the Rabbit-Duck illusion, presented in the German magazine Fliegende Blätter in 1892.I haven’t been able to locate the precise source, but here’s how you make a rabbit-duck in real life (death?) with a little help from taxidermy...
http://www.darekkocurek.com/en/gallery/image/stephen-king-the-jaunt Ed. Note: This blog originally appeared on Sleights of Mind." Your mind can be your best friend; it can keep you amused even when there's nothing to read, nothing to do...
Ed. note: this blog was originally posted at Sleights of Mind. “Deja-Vu x”, By Doris Redrupp: http://smillakatz.blogspot.com/2011/01/deja-vu.html I hate to break it to all you Keanu Reeves fans out there, but a study from Colorado State University suggests that déjà vu is not what “happens when they change something” in the Matrix...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_van_Eyck_059.jpg In case you didn’t know, academic publishing is undergoing a major upheaval. Again. It used to be that original discoveries could only be disseminated on paper, published in books and journals, which were mostly found in university libraries because their cost was so high...
Ed. Note: This blog originally appeared at Sleights of Mind. Like Giotto, Dr. Lecter has frescoed the walls of his mind. ― Thomas Harris, HannibalYesterday we wrote about the memory palace of Tom Meseroll, the Master of Martial Magic, so it is fitting that this week’s Neuroscience in Fiction pick features a fictional memory palace: the mansion of reminiscence at the center of Hannibal Lecter's brilliantly twisted mind.The fragment that follows is from Thomas Harris's Hannibal, where we learn all about Dr...
Tom Meseroll -- The Martial Magician Ed. note: This blog was originally presented at Sleights of Mind . Magicians sometimes perform seemingly impossible feats of memory, for instance, to remember the order of a "randomly shuffled" deck of cards...
Ed.note: This blog originally appeared at Sleights of Mind blog." The world is but an illusion " -- BuddhaWednesday is Illusion Day. Every Wednesday, we feature a contemporary illusion, or a variation on a classic illusion.This week's pick is a wonderful example of anamorphic art, by French artist François Abélanet...
Ed. note: A previous version of this post appeared on Sleights of Mind. “ Everything she did and love , everything she was , required language .”― Lisa Genova, Still Alice Harvard-trained neuroscientist and author Lisa Genova couldn’t get agents or publishers interested in her debut novel Still Alice ...
The Best Illusion of the Year Contest is happy to announce the TOP TEN illusions of 2013!The 2013 Contest Gala will be on Monday, May 13th, in the Philharmonic Center of Arts (Naples Fl)...
Spring (Photo Credit: Anthony Barnhart) The Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix is home to Philip Haas’ monumental sculpture installation, “The Four Seasons” until April 28, 2013.
Ed. note: This post originally appeared on http://sleightsofmind.com/blog. “The law says that there is only one possible Barth in all the world. And you aren’t it.
Gus Holwerda, who directed the soon-to-be-released atheist documentary “The Unbelievers”, also filmed the “Origins of Deception” Great Debate in which Steve Macknik and I were thrilled to participate last October...
Ed. note: Elements of this post were published previously as part of our Scientific American Special Issue on Illusions This week’s pick was inevitable in light of the news that Margaret Thatcher died on Monday...
Courtesy Jorge Otero-Millan Ed. Note: Elements of this article first appeared in a press release about our research article, from the Barrow Neurological Institute.
Source: Caroline Bonarde Ucci/Wikimedia Commons March 29 th was Good Friday, and it was no coincidence that Lawrence Krauss, author of “A Universe from Nothing” and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, chose the date as the test screening of the feature film documentary The Unbelievers , starring Krauss and Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion” and founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Art and Science.The sold-out, 3,000 seat, Gammage Memorial Auditorium at the ASU campus, concentrated a distillation of militant skeptics from the area...
The Steel Magnolias illusion, by graphic designer Michael Pickard of Sunderland University in the UK, was a Top 10 finalist in the 2007 edition of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest.
Trompe l'oeil illusions challenge your perception
