best optical illusion ever, for serious.

[alexr_rwx]

If you don't read the Mind Hacks blog, you probably should!

They're up on it, linking to the very best optical illusion I've seen yet. It's a picture of some cartoony almond-like nuts that looks like it's animated (in a slightly disconcerting, wavy sort of way) -- but it's just not. If you squint, or focus really hard, you can tell that it's not moving.

Bizarre. Brains and minds and eyes, seriously, wtf?

Comments

[billings.livejournal.com]

You CLEARLY haven't seen the hollow face illusion. It is the king of optical illusions!

[lindseykuper]

Hey, yeah! That's a really good one. Actually, the easiest way for me to tell it's not animated is to unfocus and try to take in the whole thing at once. If I focus, I can only look at a part of it at a time, and that's when it goes all wiggly.

[gtv42.livejournal.com]

I enjoy how easy it is to think, "Oh, gosh, my eyes aren't seeing that as it should appear!" But then I remember that color, shape, and form are simply perceptual mapping fodder. The world that I seem to see is brainstuff. Hanging in the art museum are canvases coated with varying chemicals that just happen to interact with the light from our sun to reflect wavelengths that our eyes map in a certain, poorly understood manner (not the chemistry, per se, but the question of the seat of consciousness...the who that is looking at the images). Everything on top of that just matter assembled into gross, macroscopic regions that we recognize as forms; where does the painting end and the atmosphere begin? What line describes the boundary between the mostly empty space of the canvas and the mostly empty space of our bodies?

Mostly bollocks, of course, as that which is human is confined to our meatspace perception, but still.