Artistic Optical Illusions

The Spinning Dancer is a kinetic, bistable optical illusion resembling a pirouetting female dancer. Some observers initially see the figure as spinning clockwise and some counterclockwise. Additionally, some may see the figure suddenly spin in the opposite direction. The illusion derives from an inherent ambiguity from the lack of visual cues for depth. There are other optical illusions that originate from the same or similar kind of visual ambiguity, such as the Necker cube.

Source: http://www.procreo.jp/labo.html

The same color illusion-also known as Adelson's checker shadow illusion, checker shadow illusion and checker shadow-is an optical illusion published by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT in 1995.[1] The squares A and B on the illusion are the same color (or shade), although they seem to be different. This can be proven by sampling the colors of A and B in an image-editing program, which will show that they are in fact the same color. By erasing everything except the two labelled squares, the effect of the illusion can be removed.

Apparently, by erasing everything except the two labelled squares, the effect of the illusion can be removed.

In this illusion, the second card from the left seems to be a stronger shade of pink in the top picture. In fact they are the same colour, but the brain changes its assumption about colour due to the colour cast of the surrounding photo.

"The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. ...As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn." -- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd edn., p. 114).

Physiological illusions, such as the afterimages following bright lights, or adapting stimuli of excessively longer alternating patterns (contingent perceptual aftereffect), are presumed to be the effects on the eyes or brain of excessive stimulation of a specific type - brightness, tilt, color, movement, etc. The theory is that stimuli have individual dedicated neural paths in the early stages of visual processing, and that repetitive stimulation of only one or a few channels causes a physiological imbalance that alters perception.

Your eyes are making them move. To test this, stare at one spot in each picture for a few seconds and everything will stop moving; OR look at the black center of each circle in the first picture, and it will stop moving; but when you move your eyes to the next black center, the previous one will move after you take your eyes away from it.

If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, the dots will remain only one color, pink. However if you stare at the black " +" in the center, the moving dots turns to green.

Now, concentrate on the black " + " in the center of the picture. After a short period, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see only a single green dot rotating.

It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see.

In black you can read the word GOOD; but the word EVIL also appears in white letters inside each black letter.

You may not see it at first, but the white spaces create the word OPTICAL,while the blue landscape spells out ILLUSION.

This one is quite tricky! The word TEACH reflects as LEARN.

You probably read the word ME in brown, but....... when you look through ME you will see YOU!

Do you need to look again?

The "illusion" is that this is just a picture of coffee beans; but it is not. Can you find a man's face among the beans? Some say that if you find the man in 3 seconds or less, the right half of your brain may be more well developed than most.

I don't know, maybe my right brain is shot.

Have you ever swore you heard or saw something and someone said "oh no you didn't"? You KNOW you heard or saw what you saw...until that is, you took a moment to see it from a different perspective.

How did you do?