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posted by CoolHand on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the brain-trickery dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

If you don't know how something works, break it. Science is built on creative destruction: Much of what neuroscientists know of the brain, they know from what gets lost during brain injuries. Under happier circumstances, they glimpse the functioning of visual perception from how it breaks down in optical illusions. For instance, the 3-D Escher-like illusions created by Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University exploit our brain's tendency to see all angles as right angles.

Some of the most dramatic illusions involve apparent motion—these appear to spin, shimmer, or shimmy even though they're completely static, like Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie–Woogie or the psychedelic pinwheels of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a psychologist at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Two more Japanese mathematicians, Hitoshi Arai at the University of Tokyo and his wife, Shinobu Arai, have created a new class of them, known as fuyuu, or floating, illusions.

The Arais have an extensive online gallery with commentary in Japanese, as well as an abridged English version. In addition to their own creations, they have collected inadvertent illusions from the real world, such as buildings that, viewed from certain angles, appear to switch places because of how their windows and other design elements line up.

Don't believe everything you see

Source: http://nautil.us/blog/how-japanese-floating-illusions-reverse_engineer-what-we-see


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:18PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:18PM (#529622)

    It's biological hacking. These "illusions" belong to a class of optical images known to permanently cause neurological damage to those that view them for a protracted period of time. You have been warned!

  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:07PM (2 children)

    by inertnet (4071) on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:07PM (#529694) Journal

    So when people have been looking at illusions for too long, their constant rocking backward and forward motion which looks like they're praying, really is neurological damage?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:34PM (#529700)

      Or they are sitting in a rocking chair. Or they are drug addicts. Or they are constantly in an environment that doesn't provide enough stimulation. Or they are autistic. So many reasons for rocking back and forth.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @01:51AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @01:51AM (#529759)

      Unlikely. The damage that occurs from staring at some of these images occurs in the visual processing areas of the brain. After exposure, the symptoms include "burn in" of colors and/or images or the inability to see certain colors and/or shapes clearly. Symptoms persist for a period of time. In some cases damage is permanent. The eyes do not appear damaged and doctors are at a loss to explain it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @03:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @03:43AM (#534327)

    [citation needed]