Stories by Susana Martinez-Conde

Colors can change with their surroundings and spread beyond the lines

Marketing illusions that make time fly

Worldwide voting will take place on the Best Illusion of the Year Contest Web site, from 4 P.M., June 29 to 4 P.M. Eastern time, June 30

They hijack its limited ability to deal with perceptual ambiguity

Long face no longer: A new study confirms that smiling makes you look younger

A YouTube video of a baboon watching a magic trick goes viral… but was it really magical for the monkey?

First impressions are not final: a new study suggests that people appear more attractive when you pay attention to their faces.

Humans are not the only species to use visual trickery to their advantage

The top 3 winners will receive: $3,000 USD for first place, $2,000 for second place, and $1,000 for third place.

Emotion never stops in everyday life. A new study reveals that people experience emotions most of the time as they go about their daily activities. The second most common feeling? Love.

Before developing perceptual constancy, three- to four-month-old babies have a striking ability to see image differences that are invisible to adults. They lose this superior skill around the age of five months

In memory of the artist David Bowie, who died on Sunday, January 10, we feature here an excerpt of the movie Labyrinth, with Bowie performing contact juggling as the Goblin King.

The trick may be to focus on leaving your old "inferior self" behind

Older people can struggle to see certain illusions, offering clues about the aging brain

The white in the middle of this lightsaber can’t be any whiter than the white background that your screen generates: but it nevertheless appears brighter. 

Contestants are invited to submit 1-minute YouTube videos featuring novel illusions (unpublished, or published no earlier than 2015) of all sensory modalities (visual, auditory, etc.). The content of the 1-minute video presenting your illusion is solely up to you, and the only requirement is that it wows all viewers!

New research shows that a mere 8 days of training can reduce the size of the physiological blind spot. 

Yesterday, the journal Nature published a short science fiction story that I wrote to explore the concept that we create reality in our own brains, irrespective of what the world outside may be like. It’s titled “Age progression.”

Hallucinations may arise from both imprecise sensory information and cognitive bias

On the night of June 7, 1525, the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer dreamt about the Apocalypse. Captivated by the dream’s imagery, he committed it to a watercolor he rushed to paint after he woke

Nineteenth-century entertainment was a peculiar mix of technological innovation and supernatural thinking

Haunted by a deceased brother, whom he saw as a twin, the Spanish artist filled his work with double meanings

Salvador Dalí always thought of himself as a replacement for his older brother, who had died before the famous painter was born. Dalí’s theory is strengthened by the fact that his older brother had also been named Salvador. That’s creepy. We’re not certain if his art was a form of therapy, but it could explain some of his weird (and wonderful!) ideas. It is perhaps not surprising that double interpretations and images abound in Dali’s art.  Our new Illusions column in Scientific American: Mind, out this month, focuses on Dalí’s Doubles.

The Thatcher illusion, discovered 35 years ago by vision scientist Peter Thompson of the University of York in the UK, was essential to current knowledge of face perception. Scientists already knew that faces were difficult to recognize upside down, but the Thatcher illusion went further to demonstrate that the brain does not merely process and store representations of whole faces, but it recognizes isolated facial features such as the mouth and eyes.