Then Mriana didn’t see the effect. The vertical line is supposed to look longer in the first picture. The darkness is just to hide the rulers, the rulers prove that each line is the same length.
I still don’t see it, but OK. As I said before, there are honestly some of these things I don’t see what is said to be the illusion. The two faces/candles I see both at the same time. Witch/young woman I can find both or see a blob.
You know, I didn’t see the rulers until you told me.
Sorry. I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t talking about lenses in one’s glasses. Rather, I was talking about the ocular lens behind the eyes’s iris and cornea. As we get older they change from being completely water clear to a slight shift toward the color of urine. (sorry for being graphic) We don’t recognize the shift, but it filters out a tiny bit of the blue light and makes slightly yellow light look about the same as white to our retinas.
Sorry. I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t talking about lenses in one’s glasses. Rather, I was talking about the ocular lens behind the eyes’s iris and cornea. As we get older they change from being completely water clear to a slight shift toward the color of urine. (sorry for being graphic) We don’t recognize the shift, but it filters out a tiny bit of the blue light and makes slightly yellow light look about the same as white to our retinas.
Occam
LOL! At any rate, I can see the illusion just fine!...urine or no urine!!
<silliness>
Heh, heh… who needs Ambervision when you’ve got tobacco and ordinary deterioration.
</silliness>
I always thought that you were talking about biology, not prescription eye-glasses Occam. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the smokers’ prescription eye-glasses turned yellow too heh heh… I said happy pretty yellow not some other word!
Another great optical illusion from Richard Wiseman’s blog: stare at the blinking dot in the middle and one or more of the three yellow dots will disappear!
Totally off topic, but sort of related. Just as I’m reading this my lady laughs out and shares an experiment she was just reading about.
Sitting at your computer, stretch out your right leg - and start making clockwise circles with your foot.
Then stretch out your right arm and in the air draw a “6”.
Another great optical illusion from Richard Wiseman’s blog: stare at the blinking dot in the middle and one or more of the three yellow dots will disappear!
I decided to experiment with this a little to narrow down the variables a bit ie. is it the blinking light that makes the dots disappear?, is it the rotating shapes? So here is what I found out. First block the blinking light with your finger tip but focus on the same spot and you will see that the other dots still disappear. So the blinking light is not causing the effect it just acts as a focal point. Second, I took a screen shot of the image to freeze it and then focused on the center. The other dots didnt disappear but they did fade significantly. Then i put my eyes just a bit out of focus and concentrated on the dot with the image frozen and the dots disappeared completely.
I think then that the flashing dot serves to force you to concentrate on the center and the rotating image may serve to throw the eyes just slightly out of focus. How this causes the dots to disappear I am not sure though. It would be interesting to know if someone who is an expert in the physiology of vision has an answer. Has anyone tried to look it up?
Update: I also changed things up a bit and focused on one of the yellow dots When you do the others disappear. So the color is not the issue since the green dot disappeared as quickly as the yellow. The distance from the focal point to the disappearing dots does not seem to be critical or at least there is a range of acceptable distance since the green dot is closer to the yellow dot than the other yellow dots and they all disappeared. When I get a chance Im going to play around with the frozen image in photoshop and see if shrinking it or enlarging it, changing the colors or getting rid of the grid altogether changes the effect. If someone else gets to this experiment first let me know what happens
Here is the explanation from a commenter at Richard Wiseman’s blog, where this was posted. I don’t know if the explanation is correct or not, but it does make sense.
Our eyes detect changes in light intensity, and if the scene does not change, our eyes jiggle a bit to stimulate the light sensitive cells (look up saccadic). The rotating background and flashing green dot supply the movement, so our eyes don’t need to jiggle. Without movement of the yellow dots, they seem to fade.
It makes sense to me because I know that if you are able to stare at any scene long enough without moving your gaze (which is surprisingly difficult to do) you will develop tunnel vision, effectively becoming blind to your peripheries. This setup is different, but I can see the same principles at work.
Here is the explanation from a commenter at Richard Wiseman’s blog, where this was posted. I don’t know if the explanation is correct or not, but it does make sense.
Our eyes detect changes in light intensity, and if the scene does not change, our eyes jiggle a bit to stimulate the light sensitive cells (look up saccadic). The rotating background and flashing green dot supply the movement, so our eyes don’t need to jiggle. Without movement of the yellow dots, they seem to fade.
This explanation does not fit with the findings from my experiment though. You can freeze the image and with no rotating background or flashing green dot the yellow dots still disappear.
This explanation does not fit with the findings from my experiment though. You can freeze the image and with no rotating background or flashing green dot the yellow dots still disappear.
Funny. In that situation, the dots do not disappear for me. At least not nearly as dramatically. They may fade a bit and lose focus, but it’s not at all the same experience.
