-- Buffalo Springfield
At some point last week John Baez sent out this tweet and optical illusion and I found it quite remarkable:
There are a great many such “motion” illusions. They are fascinating and a constant reminder of how easily manipulated human perception is.
Here’s another favorite of mine:
Some additional ones can be seen here (and there are many more):
Anyway, a day or two after John's post Mike Lawler (and others) tweeted out this “motion” illusion, remarking how amazing it was; some even calling it one of the strongest illusions they had ever seen!
Yet I, and some other folks got little from this example. The prior examples are those of motion that is mis-perceived, while this is one where motion that doesn’t even occur is perceived to take place. There are many examples of this genre of illusion, and I’ve probably seen at least 20+ I find more effective than this one — you can google “motion optical illusions” to find many; embiggen them for better effect (...FWIW, I also always had problems seeing the old “magic eye” pictures). For that matter, there are a multitude of static (motionless) optical illusions I find far more impressive than the above heralded illusion.
So I’m very curious what is going on with those of us who see little motion with this particular one? What divides the individuals who do and don’t “fall” for this illusion? Are there divisions along gender or age, left-handed vs. right-handed, Chinese-speaking vs. English, or other significant categories? Some explanations lean toward differences in depth perception... but then do those differences themselves fall along any category lines, or are they just randomly dispersed in the population?
We know from court cases, and psychology experiments for that matter, how weak eyewitness testimony can be even though people have great confidence in their visual conclusions. I wonder too, more generally, what differences may exist between people who seem to handle high-level abstraction (as in math) fairly easily, and those who have great difficulty dealing with concepts they can't "picture" in their head -- is there a difference in how these groups "see" certain optical illusions? So many questions???
We know from court cases, and psychology experiments for that matter, how weak eyewitness testimony can be even though people have great confidence in their visual conclusions. I wonder too, more generally, what differences may exist between people who seem to handle high-level abstraction (as in math) fairly easily, and those who have great difficulty dealing with concepts they can't "picture" in their head -- is there a difference in how these groups "see" certain optical illusions? So many questions???
I suspect the differences in responses to various illusions has been well-studied before, perhaps even some PhD. theses; it certainly seems fodder for analysis.
Meanwhile, not at all an illusion, but simply a mesmerizing visual delight, I'll close out with this deeeep zoom into the Mandelbrot Set... enjoy!:
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