169 Best Illusions--A Sampling
You won't believe your eyes when you see these visual illusions
169 Best Illusions--A Sampling
- Food for Thought: Visual Illusions Good Enough to Eat Our brains have evolved to quickly detect things that are important to human survival. In this “foodscape” by London photographer Carl Warner, meats and breads activate the higher-level circuits in our brain that are hard-wired to recognize foods... CARL WARNER
- Sculpting the Impossible: Solid Renditions of Visual Illusions Impossible figures, such as the famous Penrose triangle, depict 3-D objects that defy the laws of nature. Each corner of the triangle looks plausible on its own, so the brain accepts the object as a whole even though it cannot physically exist... BJØRN CHRISTIAN TØRRISSEN (BJORNFREE.COM)
- Art as Visual Research: Kinetic Illusions in Op Art With the birth of the op art movement in the 1960s, illusions became a recognized art form. The most striking examples of op art are kinetic illusions in which stationary patterns create the perception of motion... JORGE OTERO-MILLAN Barrow Neurological Institute/University of Vigo
- The Eyes Have It As social primates, humans have a keen interest in where people are looking. Vision research Pawan Sinha of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows us with this illusion that our brains determine gaze direction by comparing the dark parts of the eyes (the irises and pupils) with the whites... PAWAN SINHA AND TOMASO POGGIO M.I.T.
- Colors Out of Space Sometimes we see colors where they do not physically exist. In this illusion, the colors of the small crosses appear to diffuse into the empty spaces surrounding each intersection. This effect is known as neon color spreading, because it resembles the glare from a neon light... COURTESY OF AKIYOSHI KITAOKA, Ritsumeikan University
- The Neuroscience of Yorick’s Ghost and Other Afterimages When you stare at an image, the neurons in your retina eventually adapt to this unchanging stimulus and stop responding to it. If you then look away, you can see a ghostly afterimage during the brief period that it takes for your neurons to reset to their responsive state... LIVEWIRE PUZZLES (WWW.PUZZLES.CA)
- A Perspective on 3-D Visual Illusions The leaning tower illusion is one of the simplest visual tricks ever discovered, but it is also one of the most profound contributions to our understanding of depth perception. Three years ago Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi and Elena Gheorghiu of McGill University noticed that two identical side-by-side images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa appeared to lean at different angles... ADRIANA OLMOS; FROM “THE LEANING TOWER ILLUSION: A NEW ILLUSION OF PERSPECTIVE,” BY F.A.A. KINGDOM, A. YOONESSI, AND E. GHEORGHIU, IN PERCEPTION, VOL. 36; 2007
