Monday, August 07, 2006

Cool Optical Illusion

I love illusions. This one is hands down the best I have seen in recent memory.

Kudos for anyone who can explain it!

http://www.fretmasters.com/illusion/
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3 comments:

Alasdair said...

Wow, the Kinkaku illusion! Neat.

My stab at explanation: Staring at the inverse of the "true" image leaves an aftereffect that when you take away the modified image leaves your brain slapping the "true" colors down in the weird ones' place.

That sounds like a circular argument, but that's my stab.

3:10 PM
Alasdair said...

OK, more specifically, I think this is a complementary color thing that happens when you stare for a long time at one color, then drop into grayscale.

But I'm only an amateur brain guy :)

3:12 PM
Field Notes said...

That's more or less it... it is an aftereffect. It involves retinal saturation thrown in with some opponent-process processing in the LGN. That's in the brain's thalamus, the grand central station of neural wiring.

3:18 PM

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