This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
As tempted as I am to use the video below as an excuse to discuss this Tuesday’s presidential election, I’m going to try my hardest to stay focused on perception instead.
This illusion, entitled “When Hillary met Donald,” is a recent creation of Best Illusion of the Year Contest veterans Michael Pickard and Gurpreet Singh, from Sunderland University in the UK.
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Pickard and Singh’s “micro-macro” pictures are composite portraits of the two candidates, in which each “pixel” of the bigger pictures is a miniature version of their opponent’s photo. In a very real sense, human vision is always pixelated, though, in that photons arrive first to our retinal photoreceptors: a mosaic of discrete neural units, each in possession of the tiniest window to the visual world. These minute windows, called receptive fields, are the trees making up the forest of your perception.
Just make sure that, come Tuesday, you don’t miss the forest for the trees.
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