{"id":2329,"date":"2009-01-31T00:15:53","date_gmt":"2009-01-31T00:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/?p=2329"},"modified":"2011-05-13T05:30:26","modified_gmt":"2011-05-13T04:30:26","slug":"appearances-can-be-deceptive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/2009\/01\/31\/appearances-can-be-deceptive\/","title":{"rendered":"Appearances Can Be Deceptive"},"content":{"rendered":"

I keep running into this demonstration of how strange our brains can be, so thought I’d have a go myself.<\/p>\n

Have a look at the inverted face below.\u00a0 Upside down, but still pretty cute eh?<\/p>\n

\"Cute\"
Cute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now look at the next picture where she’s turned the right way round – yuk!<\/p>\n

But it’s exactly the same picture just inverted.\u00a0 Our brains somehow pick out the individual elements of the face and reconstruct them as we normally expect to see them – I guess?\u00a0\u00a0 Personally, I can’t see a glum person in the top picture without turning my head to a degree – I’ve just discovered – not so good for my neck.<\/p>\n

\"Not
Not so cute. Well, not so happy anyhow.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This simple example was made by cutting, rotating, and pasting the mouth of the girl in the painting.<\/p>\n

I saw something like this a couple of years back at the Exploratorium Science Centre<\/a> in San Francisco.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The most recent demonstration I’ve seen was at the Weird Science<\/a> event here in London earlier this month, where Richard Wiseman had us all in hysterics with a doctored picture of Margaret Thatcher.\u00a0 That was doubly strange, as: (a) he’d turned the eyes round as well (which is the correct thing to do, but my painting struggles because of the hair) and, (b) rotated the image slowly, which revealed there is a certain point where the brain clicks over to seeing the ‘new’ image – the gestalt switch<\/em><\/a> moment.<\/p>\n

The Exploratorium exhibition also included so-called hybrid images of faces that change expression depending on how near or far you stand from them.\u00a0 The effect still works very well on a computer screen, but you need to stand a long way back.<\/p>\n

Not entirely sure how the brain processes compare for the two types of phenomena, but I find the ‘switch’ is more gradual with the hybrid images.\u00a0\u00a0 In deference to copyright I’ll not share the snaps I took, but you can find something very similar at the ‘Hybrid Images’ website<\/a> owned by Dr.Aude Olivia, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.<\/p>\n

\"See
See Sophie smile and scowl and smile and scowl and smile<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I keep running into this demonstration of how strange our brains can be, so thought I’d have a go myself. Have a look at the inverted face below.\u00a0 Upside down, but still pretty cute eh? Now look at the next picture where she’s turned the right way round – yuk! But it’s exactly the same … Continue reading Appearances Can Be Deceptive<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,313,231,348],"tags":[315,553,551,552,499,554,550,1414,267],"class_list":["post-2329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-museums","category-psychology","category-rational","category-second-life","tag-brain","tag-brain-and-cognitive-studies","tag-cognition","tag-exploratorium","tag-gestalt-switch","tag-illusion","tag-perception","tag-second-life","tag-weird-science"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkpOr-Bz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2329"}],"version-history":[{"count":48,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15585,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2329\/revisions\/15585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}