Are you artistic or logic?
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If you see the girl turning clockwise then you are a logical person. Or was the other way around?
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clockwise
Guess I am logical, I was never artistic anyway.
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Counter-clockwise.
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@Independent said:
If you see the girl turning clockwise then you are a logical person. Or was the other way around?
I can get it to go both ways. The trick is to keep staring at the leg and shadow underneath.
What's actually happening is the figure only rotates about 180 degrees, from horizontal left to horizontal right, and then back again. Think like windshield wipers. If you scroll down so you can only see from about waist down, you can actually see this.
The figure is never actually facing forward or backwards, in other words. Our brains just compensate and it looks to us as if she's rotating.
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Hah, I had a hard time getting her to spin counter-clockwise.
So I hacked it. I held a mirror to it and covered the original. Stared at the mirror image a while then moved back to the original and presto.
The counter-clockwise appears as a slightly bottom-up view. The clockwise one is slightly top-down.
It's really weird to see the mirror image rotate in the same direction, by the way.
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I'm logical. BTW, dhromed, I'm your fan now for that trick.
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What's actually happening is the figure only rotates about 180 degrees, from horizontal left to horizontal right, and then back again
You can't discern that from the image. The rotation axis is exactly perpendicular to the canvas.
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[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]I'm logical. BTW, dhromed, I'm your fan now for that trick.[/quote]
wheee
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@dhromed said:
Hah, I had a hard time getting her to spin counter-clockwise.
So I hacked it. I held a mirror to it and covered the original. Stared at the mirror image a while then moved back to the original and presto.
The counter-clockwise appears as a slightly bottom-up view. The clockwise one is slightly top-down.
It's really weird to see the mirror image rotate in the same direction, by the way.
It's much easier than that, and it's all about expectations. Close your eyes. Think about rotation (imagine something spinning). Open your eyes. It'll almost certainly be going the same way.
The image is ambiguous so your brain interprets based on whatever memory is closest to hand. Most of this right/left brain stuff is pop science nonsense; except in certain brain disorders, it's largely irrelevant. The human mind is not a simple dimorphic thing: it has more than one bit of variation in it and you cannot classify minds based on some arbitrary scale between "logical" and "artistic". There may be relationships between those two things, if you could ever manage to define them, but they are not opposing influences, and they certainly don't have anything to do with the lateral halves of the brain.
Since there's a big hole down the middle, and individual major functions tend to be clustered together in the same physical location, many functions (like language processing or counting) don't cross the boundary, and related functions tend to be close together, but that's about where it ends. Counting is not a "left-brain" function, it's just that when you look for where it is in a large number of people, it's on the left more often than it's on the right - a simple statistical trend, nothing more. This is probably related to the higher frequency of right-handed people, although nobody's been able to prove that yet.
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When I first looked it spun counter-clockwise, then I made it spin clockwise, and I had trouble convincing myself that it was ever spinning counter-clockwise. Of course, it's 1 am.
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@asuffield said:
It's much easier than that, and it's all about expectations. Close your eyes. Think about rotation (imagine something spinning). Open your eyes. It'll almost certainly be going the same way.
The image is ambiguous so your brain interprets based on whatever memory is closest to hand. Most of this right/left brain stuff is pop science nonsense; except in certain brain disorders, it's largely irrelevant. The human mind is not a simple dimorphic thing: it has more than one bit of variation in it and you cannot classify minds based on some arbitrary scale between "logical" and "artistic". There may be relationships between those two things, if you could ever manage to define them, but they are not opposing influences, and they certainly don't have anything to do with the lateral halves of the brain.
Since there's a big hole down the middle, and individual major functions tend to be clustered together in the same physical location, many functions (like language processing or counting) don't cross the boundary, and related functions tend to be close together, but that's about where it ends. Counting is not a "left-brain" function, it's just that when you look for where it is in a large number of people, it's on the left more often than it's on the right - a simple statistical trend, nothing more. This is probably related to the higher frequency of right-handed people, although nobody's been able to prove that yet.
Totally.
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@shadowman said:
@Independent said:
If you see the girl turning clockwise then you are a logical person. Or was the other way around?
I can get it to go both ways. The trick is to keep staring at the leg and shadow underneath.
...Another trick is to point your finger up and move your wrist in the direction you want to see her spin in, somewhere in front of the monitor. She will change directions as soon as the left/right movement of your wrist/finger matches that of her leg.
And yeah, it's all pop psychology. (Without the proper references, anyway)
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That's weird, I looked at it and it was OBVIOUSLY moving counter clockwise. Then I went back to this thread, went forward again to the link, and it was OBVIOUSLY moving clockwise. It's a cool optical illusion but I don't think it's any deeper than the old "fold your hands together and see what thumb is on top" trick.
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it was counter-clockwise for me, then i started reading the text to the right and it started roting clockwise, If i read the text-ad to the left it start's going counter-clockwise again.
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I'm feeling very dizzy - sometimes she goes one way, and sometimes she goes another....
Maybe I'm just an AC/DC kinda guy???
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@shadowman said:
What's actually happening is the figure only rotates about 180 degrees, from horizontal left to horizontal right, and then back again. Think like windshield wipers. If you scroll down so you can only see from about waist down, you can actually see this.
This isn't actually true; if it were, the distant foot shadow would just oscillate back and forth, but it's only visible every other time; this indicates that the figure is indeed "rotating" about the axis which contains the leg that is ostensibly touching the ground.
The interesting thing is that this is a definite non-physical image, because it has a mix of orthographic and perspective effects: If this was truly a perspective view then the outstretched leg would get bigger as it moved faster if she was spinning clockwise (swept leg moving right to left in front of her body) and would be smaller as it moved from left to right (behind her) but the image is tweaked such that the leg is the same size for both oscillations. However, in a pure orthographic view (the only other case where leg dimension would remain constant for either in front or behind) you would not be able to see the shadow on the floor: In fact, you couldn't see the floor at all because it parallels the viewing line and, in orthographic views, you cannot see any variations on the viewing line.
Furthermore, the figure must be spinning counter-clockwise, because the only way to see the shadow the way it is drawn means that the visible component of the outstretched foot while looking at the floor from above is if the image is when the outstretched leg is behind the body of the figure; the near side would be a larger half-ellipse and it is below the bottom edge of the image frame. If you could see the portion of the arc when the swept leg was closer to you, you would actually be able to see both the near and far portions - and therefore never have any confusion about the direction of rotation. You cannot physically only see the near the shadow from the near sweep without seeing it from the far sweep, but you can see the far sweep only if you're "too close".
All other interpretations are non-physical.
Even knowing this, though, my brain tries to make the figure spin clockwise - but less frequently now that I know the only physical explanation for the image.
(And yay for putting my 3D frame-of-reference knowledge to work!)
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Clock-wise. Of course, I was looking at her from underneath.
Heh, heh, heh!
@aib said:
Another trick is to point your finger up and move your wrist in the direction you want to see her spin in, somewhere in front of the monitor. She will change directions as soon as the left/right movement of your wrist/finger matches that of her leg.
And yeah, it's all pop psychology. (Without the proper references, anyway)
Seriously, I thought the page was a joke. I couldn't even imagine how anyone could think counter-clockwise. Then I tried your trick, and WHAM! - I could actually see the figure stop - almost like slowing to a stop - then start spinning the other way. Cool trick.
Incidentally, it worked the first time with my right hand, then I lost it. Then it worked with my left hand, then I lost it and the right hand worked again.
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If I hold my finger just a few centimeters in front of her leg, and the range of the left-right swing match perfectly, I can make her change directions every few seconds or so... (It takes a while to synchronize the swing)
Now, the question is, is it the visual clue from my eyes, or the physical clue from my body's motion sensors that are helping me with this?
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@asuffield said:
The image is ambiguous so your brain interprets based on whatever memory is closest to hand. Most of this right/left brain stuff is pop science nonsense; except in certain brain disorders, it's largely irrelevant. The human mind is not a simple dimorphic thing: it has more than one bit of variation in it and you cannot classify minds based on some arbitrary scale between "logical" and "artistic". There may be relationships between those two things, if you could ever manage to define them, but they are not opposing influences, and they certainly don't have anything to do with the lateral halves of the brain.
Apart from the memory, I agree with you here (about memory: movement is clearly detected in V1 and V2, which are absolutely not memory related).
Since there's a big hole down the middle, and individual major functions tend to be clustered together in the same physical location, many functions (like language processing or counting) don't cross the boundary, and related functions tend to be close together, but that's about where it ends. Counting is not a "left-brain" function, it's just that when you look for where it is in a large number of people, it's on the left more often than it's on the right - a simple statistical trend, nothing more. This is probably related to the higher frequency of right-handed people, although nobody's been able to prove that yet.
Hold it right there, cowboy. For one, there is no big hole down the middle. There is a huge bundle of fiber tract, called corpus callosum holding hundreds of millions of neural connections. Plus there are quite a few brain centers that are not lateralized, such as the brain stem and the cerebellum, (hypo)thalamus, the midbrain, well, a lot of stuff.
Furthermore, there is some evidence that language processing actually does cross the gap. To begin with, visual and auditive input gets processed by both brain halves, so at least something jumps across. But higher level processing seems to involve both hemispheres (that's the technical term right there) as well. Since we have fMRI and MEG, the whole picture of lateralized processing has gotten a lot fuzzier. Of course, it seems there is some difference, but at the moment we have no clue about the nature of the division. What you might be right about, is that it is unlikely that left and right do the same functions or work together as one single unit.
PS Yes, I hold a post-doc in neuro-cognitive imaging and modelling.
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@dhromed said:
What's actually happening is the figure only rotates about 180 degrees,
from horizontal left to horizontal right, and then back againYou can't discern that from the image. The rotation axis is exactly perpendicular to the canvas.
Actually you can't discern it from the image because it's not true - one foot traces out an ellipse (foreshortened circle)
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@TGV said:
@asuffield said:
The image is ambiguous so your brain interprets based on whatever memory is closest to hand. Most of this right/left brain stuff is pop science nonsense; except in certain brain disorders, it's largely irrelevant. The human mind is not a simple dimorphic thing: it has more than one bit of variation in it and you cannot classify minds based on some arbitrary scale between "logical" and "artistic". There may be relationships between those two things, if you could ever manage to define them, but they are not opposing influences, and they certainly don't have anything to do with the lateral halves of the brain.
Apart from the memory, I agree with you here (about memory: movement is clearly detected in V1 and V2, which are absolutely not memory related).
Okay, 'memory' is a bit too imprecise. It's more like 'residual effects of recent stimulus in that part of the brain' - a recent (as in, past few seconds) experience of rotating motion in a sensory input will tend to override anything, but if there isn't one, the brain will pick up on eris-knows-what that happened to be in the area. It's not the same function that we tend to label 'memory', but from a functional perspective there's not a lot of difference. The human brain operates somewhat like a noisy network line - if it doesn't have a strong signal to process, it will happily process noise and pretend that it's a real signal.
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@asuffield said:
Okay, 'memory' is a bit too imprecise. It's more like 'residual effects of recent stimulus in that part of the brain' - a recent (as in, past few seconds) experience of rotating motion in a sensory input will tend to override anything, but if there isn't one, the brain will pick up on eris-knows-what that happened to be in the area. It's not the same function that we tend to label 'memory', but from a functional perspective there's not a lot of difference. The human brain operates somewhat like a noisy network line - if it doesn't have a strong signal to process, it will happily process noise and pretend that it's a real signal.
Well... going a bit OT, but your brain has a clear limit for processing noise. Look at some static noise on your TV and you'll know it's noise, not a broadcast. Or try to listen to white noise. The brain does do its best to interpret everything it receives, but the primary visual cortices are very hard wired and motion detection is not easily changed: it forms itself during the first months of your life and doesn't really change (as far as we can tell from animal research). There is however a small amount of top-down control possible and that explains the Neckermann cube effect and possibly this one. The memory effect in these cases is very, very short lived, and it has to be. Otherwise, you would interpret all motions in the same fashion and that's evolutionary not the best strategy for survival...
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@Random832 said:
@dhromed said:
What's actually happening is the figure only rotates about 180 degrees,
from horizontal left to horizontal right, and then back againYou can't discern that from the image. The rotation axis is exactly perpendicular to the canvas.
Actually you can't discern it from the image because it's not true - one foot traces out an ellipse (foreshortened circle)
By golly.
I was misguided by the bobbing up and down.
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@TGV said:
Well... going a bit OT, but your brain has a clear limit for processing noise. Look at some static noise on your TV and you'll know it's noise, not a broadcast.
Stare at it for a while anyway, and you'll start seeing patterns in the noise. You know they aren't really there, but you still see them. Of course, we're now talking about larger parts of the brain, not just the primary visual processing.
Or try to listen to white noise.
That's a special case. The human auditory system can't handle white noise properly, so it's wired to throw it away without trying to process it. You get more interesting results from low-frequency-density random noise.
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