Bending Lines

The illusions I’m about to show you are great examples of how your mind interprets perspective. Your mind can easily tell which objects are father apart and closer by comparing relative sizes and looking at your surroundings. But what happens if you don’t know the size or location of the object? Our minds then make assumptions about objects that aren’t necessarily true. The illusions below illustrate my point.

Do the lines seem straight, or do they seem curved outward?

This illusion is based on the Hering illusion which was published in 1861. The lines in the illusion are actually straight and parallel across the entire background.

What do these lines look like? Do they look straight?

This type of illusion works because of the background pattern. This type of pattern (lines moving toward a vanishing point) reminds your mind of surfaces bending in 3D. After, your mind tries to make sense of the information and makes you believe that the lines are bending. In a sense, your mind is trying to make the pattern or depth seem logical by making you think that the lines are bending.

Another Illusion like this is shown below:

Does the square seem somewhat warped? The square is actually made up of perfectly straight lines.

This occurs because the slanted lines around the square make it seem that the top of the square is farther back than the bottom of the square. Since the bottom and top are the same size, but the top is “farther away”, the top of the square actually looks somewhat larger than the bottom.

Thats all for now,

Amanda

Lines and Spaces

There are many illusions that trick your mind and perceptions. The illusion is based on relative proportions and positions that trick the viewer into believing one object is longer or shorter than another. An example of this kind of illusion is shown below (taken from Optical Illusion Magic by Michael DiSpezio)

Believe it or not, there are three pairs of lines that are of the same length. Can you guess which ones?

The Answer is: (1) The red and blue lines , (2) The green and yellow lines , and (3) The purple and orange lines

Doesn’t seem true?

This illusion is made up of two important visual tricks. One being the interruption of the line and the placement of the circles. As you can see, when the lines cross through the circles, the lines seem shorter. With an addition of circles at the endpoints, the lines seem longer.

-Amanda

Inside Out

When you draw a face, many people use shadows to help add depth and realism to a portrait. Shadows allow simple 2d images to construct depth. Shadows are also important clues that help us recognize and read faces. The illusion I want to show you illustrates how we use shadows and assumption to determine if a face in convex or concave (and our flaws in doing so.)

(image taken from Optical Illusion Magic by Michael DiSpezio)

The picture above shows a picture of the convex (front) of the mask and its concave side (the inside of the mask). Surprisingly the inside of the mask looks like it is convex because of the shadows and lighting of the face.

A good representation of this phenomenon would be the “rotating mask” illusion.

What is interesting about this illusion is that your mind is tricked into thinking that the concave (inside) of the mask is a convex version. This occurs because your mind recognizes faces as being “3d”, so once the front of the mask turns and the features of the back of the mask emerge you see a convex image. Once the features turn away however, you see the image as concave (or bending inward).

-Amanda

Blurry Images

When you look at an image, what do you see? Many people ignore that fact that an image contains thousands of pixels that literally make up the image you see. For this next illusion, I’ll try to display the differences in how your mind literally recognizes an image.

Can you identify what the picture is of?

Initially when seeing a picture like this, it was very hard for me to recognize the object or person in the picture. This happens because up close, the individual color squares are all you pay attention to. All you can really see is blocks of different colors.

Try to step back a few feet, do you recognize the picture now? The picture should be a lot clearer.

To display this online, I reduced the amount of blur on the image.

As you can see, the picture is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. It was just hard to identify because your mind focused on the individual pixels. However, when the image was viewed from a distance, the boxes blended together and your mind recognized the similarities between neighboring boxes. When doing this, your mind was finally able to recognize the image as an actual “face”.

Salvador Dali also used the same technique in one of his paintings shown below.

When viewed from a distance the image looks like a portrait of Abe Lincoln.

To read more about this painting you can go here

-Amanda

Invisible Shapes?

As you all know, one of the main functions of your brain is to interpret and make sense of what you see. Your brain tries to make sense of information in order to help you understand and make sense of what you’re actually seeing. Sometimes, your brain encounters information that doesn’t fully make sense. When this happens, your mind actually tries to make sense of the information-making it seem logical to the individual. An example of how this happens can be seen in the illusions I’ve made below.

Count how many triangles there are in the illusion below.

Notice the picture above. When I first saw an illusion like this, I thought there were two large triangles, one overlapping the other. In essence I saw something like this:

The interesting thing about this illusion is that there aren’t ANY triangles. Your brain literally made it up. Your brain was fooled into thinking that one triangle was overlapping the other because of the shapes surrounding the lines.

To understand this you have to understand the way your mind works. Think about all the the things and objects you see every day. Thats A LOT of information to process just in one day. In order to make it easier to process information your brain keeps track of information-sort of like a short cut. This makes it easier for your brain to process information and make assumptions about what you see around you every day.

Knowing that, your brain tried to make sense of the images by “filling in” the empty space or gaps. That was what led to to see and conclude that there was in fact a “hidden” triangle in front of the outline of the visible “triangle”.

Another illusion I’ve made that has the same effect is shown below

Do you see the white circles?

Thanks for reading,

-Amanda

Left Brain VS. Right Brain

Another one of my favorite illusion pertains to the struggle between your left and right brain. As you all know, your left brain is logically based while your right brain controls feeling, emotion and art based thoughts (as shown in the list below)

One of my favorite simple illusions demonstrates how your left and right brain actually function.

In this illusion, you have to say color the words are in opposed to the word itself, so instead of saying the color RED you have to say what color the word is written in. I found that people in my family (including myself) had trouble saying the colors. I learned that this happens because your left and right brain clash, making it harder to say the color instead of reading this word. The fact is, your left brain is trying to read the words but your right brain is trying to say the color that the word is written in.

Did you have trouble saying the colors?

-Amanda

Eye Can See It

While going through my comments, I was inspired to do an entry on illusions pertaining to sight and eye functions (ie. the optic nerve). One interesting feature of our eyes that many seem to forget, would be the “blind spot” that we each have. This occurs because there is a portion of our eyes (where the optic nerve leads back into the brain) where there are no light sensitive rods pick up stimuli or gather information. In short, the “blind” spot is a small portion of your eye that has no field of vision. You may think that it is easy to find your blind spot but in reality the blind spots in both your eyes correspond to the other eye. This means that your right eye can see the what is left behind in the left eye’s blind spot (and vise versa). An example of your blindspot can be shown below:

Stare at the blue dot in the center for 10 seconds-do not shift your gaze. Do any of the surrounding red dots change color or disappear?

The illusion above is a great example of blind spots because in my own experience I saw that the red dots slowly began to disappear. This occurs because the red dots fall under the portion of your eye’s retina that you cannot see. I scanned this illusion from the book Colorful Optical Illusions by Aki Nurosi.

Another example of how your eyes receive information would be an example of “after images”. Notice the simple picture below.

When staring at an image for a long time, the color or image gets burned into your retinas (memory). Instead of being an exact copy of color however, you end up seeing an inversion of color. Take the picture above for example. Stare at the picture of inverted fruits for 30 seconds. Then stare at a white piece of paper. You’ll notice that the fruits change into their original color!

-Amanda

Color My World

When looking at different color optical illusions, one thing I found very interesting was how contrast and placement of different colors changes our perspective and view on how the colors actually look. For example when placing a color with its compliment (red/green, blue/orange) the color seems much brighter than it actually is. One example of how these illusions come into play in real life was described in the book Colorful Optical Illusions by Aki Nurosi. The author mentioned how color is a very important aspect in marketing and supermarkets. Many times, in the meat isle the products are surrounded by the color green or white which actually accentuates and brightens the red meat. Another example would be how many companies use the color green and blue to accentuate the orange color of carrots. I was really surprised to see how commonplace optical illusions are in the marketing industry, and how easy it is to get tricked simply by knowing your complimentary colors! An example of a simple Munker color illusion is showed below.

Shown above are two diagrams of simple color illusions. Which “bar” seems to be brighter? The one on the left, or the one on the right? Naturally the one on the right does. We are fooled to believe that the “bar” on the right is lighter, but in reality both bars are the same shade. The bar[s] on the right only look darker because they are surrounded by the horizontal black bars. In contrast, the bar[s] on the right of both diagrams are surrounded by white which makes them seem lighter when they really aren’t.

Another example of a color illusion would be the famous “Checkerboard’ Illusion shown below.

I was skeptical when I learned that both square A and B were the same color. The placement of the squares makes it look like the Square A is much darker than Square B. To give myself a better view on the actual colors of both squares I decided to take the illusion apart on paint to check the squares really were the same color .

As you can see, the squares are actually the same color! Our minds were tricked to believe that square A was darker because of the shadow on square B.

Thats all for now,

-Your Optical Illusionist

Face It

One of my favorite illusion categories would have to be form perception-which is based around how objects look different when viewed from different angles. One good example of form perception illusions would be how objects look upside down versus right side up. I’ve seen form perception illusions many times, and will try to demonstrate how these illusions work by showing you ones that I have made using photoshop. This illusion will demonstrate the differences in how individuals view figures right side up compared to the same figures and upside down and why these differences occur. Pictured below is a picture of George Washington upside down.

Do you see anything wrong? When I first viewed this kind of illusion I thought the picture was perfectly normal.

Now look at the SAME picture of George Washington right side up

Not what you expected? When I first saw an illusion like this I was extremely confused. Why did the picture look so normal upside down, and so distorted upside down. The answer has to do with how our mind sees faces. The fact is, our minds can only recognize distortions and such when a face is right side up. But when the picture is flipped, the your brain doesn’t see the image as a face of a person but rather objects which prevents you from noticing any distortions.

Another reason for why the face looks distorted when viewed right side up is because your mind uses locater points when viewing faces (the eyes, nose, mouth). When a face is right side up, you can make relationships (how each feature relates to each other), but when a face is flipped upside down your mind can no longer make these relationships and you will no longer be able to determine distortions. Isn’t that weird?

Well-thats all for now,

-Amanda

please leave comments and suggestions!

Hey there!

This is my first post! Just to get started, I’ll let you know what I’ll be talking about here. A couple of months ago my grade was told to conduct a personal project that addressed a specific topic we were interested in. Naturally, I chose optical illusions so from now on this will be my outlet to discuss specific optical illusions and write about how and why your brain gets tricked. Since this is my first post I’ll start off with a short and simple Illusion that I made myself.

Try reading the words above quickly (reading aloud can help). After doing so, read the words again. Do you notice anything different?

*Explanation*

Naturally our brain tends to skim through words to get the main meaning of a text. When I first came across an illusion like this one, I didn’t find anything wrong with the sentence. After reading the sentence a couple of times though, I was surprised to see that some of the words were repeated. In the illusion I made above, there are duplicates of the words “as” and “a” but when skimming or reading through the sentence quickly, many people fail to notice the extra addition of words.

This illusion is an example of how or brain gathers and interprets information. It also shows how we can skip information and words unconsciously.

Thats all for now,

-Amanda

ps. don’t forget to leave comments and suggestions!