Morning all,
Ever wonder why your mind wants to perceive illusions like this one….as slanted in or out?
Even more interesting…..why does the illusion on the left look like the lines are bending in, while the one on the right are bowing out?
My inbox provided the answer! Yesterday’s Daily Dose from Nicky510 (did I mention yet how truly enjoyable this free newsletter is?) was really amazing! Check it out below.
<ahem>
Hey, hey, hey! Check it out! I broke the illusion code. How do we know this? Well, if you look at the two Gardens of Confusion above you’ll see that the one on the left is what we’ve gotten used to over the last week….
But one on the right is verrrry different – namely it tilts in the opposite direction.
In prior tests we saw that the illusion was pretty robust and no matter if I altered color or the type of the black/white objects we still got the same basic illusion.
I knew that the effect must be something that’s tricking our brains and I started to wonder if the effect of the black/white images WITH the green circles was causing my brain to think it was looking at something dynamic. Think of a pinwheel and how you’d see it cartooned – with "speed lines" – like this:
If you look at the way the black/white image goes around the central green circle that I’ve placed on the right, you’ll see that it’s awfully similar. (Note that I lightened the surrounding circles so you can see the central circle and squares more clearly). But (there’s always a but) how does our brain interpret this? Well, we expect round things to spin when they’re rolling downhill.
So maybe that’s what’s causing us to see a slant – the "speed lines" are telling our brains that the circles must be rolling.
BUT (sheesh – another but!) the direction of the rotation is DIFFERENT for the two shades of green. If you look at the dark ones (to be specific – look on the upper right corner on the left pic) they appear to be rotating counterclockwise and the pic seems to be slanted down to the left. So that matches. However, the light green circles seem to be rotating clockwise.
Why does the picture seem to slope down to the left when the light circles would seemingly cause it to look like it’s sloping down to the right?
The reason, I think, is that our brains give priority to the images that most closely match in terms of their darkness. Thus our brains see the dark green circles and the black squares as being related and ignore the light green circles.
Could I test this? Sure! All I’d need to do is color all the light green circles dark green and the dark green ones light green. If I’m right, that would switch the orientation of the black "speed lines" with respect to new dark greenies and the result should be that the upper right portion of the image on the right (the one I did the color switch on) should look like it’s tilted down to the right. And it is!
Mystery solved! Or, is it?
If I were REALLY confident I’d put my theory to the test in one last way, What I’d do is alter the two circles so that they had different shades and then I’d alter their brightness so that they were equal – neither one any darker than the other.
If my theory is correct, then our brains should be unable to fixate on either of them and the illusion would be shattered – we’d just see a normal rectangular pattern. Am I brave enough to try? Sure am. And here’s the result:
Total validation. I believe that this is one optical mystery whose secrets have now been fully uncovered.
Look above one more time…and now look again at the original image:
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Enjoy,
Barbara Ling
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