10 most famous internet illusions and exposing them

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Do not believe your eyes.

1. The Troxler effect

If you look closely at this image and focus on it for about 30 seconds, it will simply disappear. You can click on it to open the full picture. Most importantly, do not look away.

This optical illusion is called the Troxler effect and was described back in 1804. An illusion arises because our brain removes stationary objects from the image from the retina - thus we do not notice capillaries in our eye, corneal scratches, as well as defects in the lens and vitreous body. It also helps us to ignore our nose.

Usually, a person's eyes are fixed on objects for 0, 2–0, 6 seconds, after which they make a reflex movement back and forth. This is necessary so as not to lose sight of the object. But when you suppress the urge to shift your gaze and stare at the blurry image, the brain begins to "cut" it, considering it unimportant.

By the way, the Troxler effect also affects other senses. It is thanks to him that you, for example, do not notice the smell of your cologne: sensory neurons get used to these stimuli and discard them as something insignificant.

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2. Magic dress

On February 26, 2015, a photo of a lace dress from Roman Originals was posted on the social network, which instantly went viral. Click on the picture to expand it.

Social media users fiercely argued whether it was blue and black or white and gold. And the BuzzFeed resource conducted a survey, as a result of which two-thirds of its participants decided that the dress was still white and gold.

But in fact, the dress is blue with black stripes - that's on the manufacturer's website.

Neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Natz explain the dress phenomenon as follows. People have the ability to chromatically adapt - thanks to it, we perceive colors in about the same way at different times of the day. That is, a red strawberry, for example, seems red to us in the morning, afternoon, and evening, because our brain is used to seeing it like that, even if the lighting changes color.

This ability plays a cruel joke with us in the case of the dress, since the colors in the photo are not rendered correctly. Bevil Conway suggests that people who are diurnal tend to see the dress in white, while those who are nightly tend to see it blue. Everyone subconsciously chooses the colors that he sees most often.

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3. Illusion of volume

There is a dent on the floor. Was it done by accident or deliberately? And if intentionally, then how and why?

If you look at the "dent" from any point of view, without being in front of the door, it will disappear.

The thing is that the manufacturers of finishing materials from Casa Ceramica have prepared the tiles in a special way, so that the shape of its individual fragments creates a "crater" effect. This floor is in one Casa Ceramica showroom in Manchester, and it was made to make people move more slowly and carefully down the hallways.

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4. A cat walking up the stairs

This photo of a cat appeared on the Internet back in 2015, and since then people who have seen it ask themselves the question: is this cat climbing the stairs or descending from it?

After careful research, Business Insider concluded that the cat is coming down. This is indicated by the protruding sills of the steps. In addition, the cat's pose - the tail is held for balance, the gaze is directed to the steps - confirms that it is moving down, not up.

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5. Crazy hugs

This photo rocked Reddit in 2018 when it was shared by user Blood_Reaper. Click on it to open it completely and take a look at the legs of the hugging people. Do both pairs of limbs belong to a tall, dark-skinned guy? Or did the girl slip her legs underneath him?

If you take a closer look at the photo, you will easily understand that the man's shorts are black on the sides and white in the middle. They merge with the white trousers that the woman wore.

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6. Gambit with a green top hat

This optical illusion was invented by Checkershadow Illusion, ophthalmology professor Edward H. Adelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Look closely at tiles A and B. Don't you think they differ in color?

And completely in vain. The tiles are of the same color, as you can see by looking at this picture.

Or open it in Photoshop or any other editor and compare the color swatches taken with the Eyedropper tool.

The tile next to the cylinder appears darker to us because our brain compares the color of the object to the colors around it. Square A is surrounded by lighter squares, which makes it darker, and against the background of dark cells, square B looks lighter.

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7. Pink / blue sneakers

In 2017, a photo of the sneaker circulated on Twitter, causing fierce controversy. Users could not decide what color it was - pink-white or gray-turquoise. How do you think?

In fact, the shoe is pink. One Twitter user "" displayed the colors in this low-light photo and the shoes got their natural look. The hand, by the way, also began to look normal, not cyanotic.

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8. Toy railroad

This photo was posted by BBC presenter Mark Blank-Settle on Twitter. It depicts two parts of a toy railroad. They can be connected, and a train will travel along the road. What do you think is the larger part?

Take a look at this video and you will see that the parts are the same. This optical illusion is called the Jastrow effect, after an American psychologist.

Back in the 19th century, he discovered that two identical curved shapes would visually differ in size when aligned along the edge. Unfortunately, it is still unclear why our brains force us to see shapes this way.

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9. Twelve points

Click on this image to open it in full and find the 12 black dots. Try to see them all at once.

This illusion was first published by Jacques Ninio and Kent A. Stevens in 2000 in the academic journal Perception. It gained popularity when psychology professor Akioshi Kitaoka at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto shared it on Facebook.

The illusion is a variation on the famous Hermann's grid, created by the German physiologist Ludimar Hermann in 1870. As a result of the imperfection of our retina, we see gray spots at the intersections of white lines where they are not. And on the grid from Ninio and Stevens, on the contrary, points are not visible that are in the field of peripheral vision.

The reason is that we don't have very good peripheral vision. Therefore, the brain thinks out those fragments to which we do not pay direct attention. We see one black dot, while the rest are out of focus. The brain does not attach importance to them and simply does not render them.

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10. Sad Tyrannosaurus

Take a look at this cute dinosaur. He looks with such an apologetic look, as if he just ripped your couch. Wait a minute, is he following you with his eyes? How is this possible?

Watch the video to the end, and you will see that the head of the tyrannosaurus is not convex - it is drawn on a piece of cardboard bent inward. Because of this, and also because one of the Tyrannosaurus's eyes is larger than the other, your brain creates Another Brain-Melting Illusion: The Dragon That Follows Your Gaze illusion that its muzzle has volume. An illusion with a "floating" cube in front of a piece of paper has a similar principle of action.

This is called the "empty face illusion."According to neuropsychologist Richard Gregory, all faces and muzzles of animals seem to us to be convex, because in reality we do not encounter creatures with concave heads.

If you want, you can carve your own Tyrannosaurus and amuse your friends and acquaintances. These are the toys where you can find many 2D models for printing.

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