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Perceptual Illusions (2018)

nautil.us

21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#21
post #13

Number 12 is quite something, it works with anything you look at after staring the center of the top image. I looked at my food and I could see it moving in a very odd manner, went back to image for 15 seconds and looked at the walls, same effect and repeated the same with other stuff and after 10 minutes I feel motion sickness like the one you get after spinning and losing your balance (not everyone gets this I thin…

I regularly go on 10+ mile hikes with my girlfriend and we’ve noticed this happens after 2-3 hrs of straight, continuous hiking. When you all the sudden stop, it looks like the surrounding environment is coming at you. Super weird, same concept.

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#22
post #13

Number 12 is quite something, it works with anything you look at after staring the center of the top image. I looked at my food and I could see it moving in a very odd manner, went back to image for 15 seconds and looked at the walls, same effect and repeated the same with other stuff and after 10 minutes I feel motion sickness like the one you get after spinning and losing your balance (not everyone gets this I thin…

Nos. 3 and 4 only work at some sizes. If you increase or decrease the size of no 4, the illusion goes Away. For no 3, if you size up, the illusion goes away (as the bleed stops being an issue)

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#23

One of may favourite instances of an optical illusion ever is this short video of a cat pouncing on a sheet of paper on which shows an apparent-motions spirals illusion. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=S4IHB3qK1KU It reveals that at least this aspect of feline and human visual perception appears to be similar. As a means of getting inside a cat's head, it's never failed to fascinate me. There's another ... perceptual phenom…

Found it, episode 103, "Desirability Bias" Mind, after several months of not having heard that episode ... I understood the audio immediately. Audio: https://youarenotsosmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/103-... (mp3) Episode: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/07/20/yanss-103-desirabili... When David McRaney says "savour that feeling, because there is no going back ", believe him. There really isn't. The clip, and…

Funny, I was able to wring some sense out of it on second hearing just because I was primed to expect that there was something there. But it turned out not to be quite the right answer. Now that I have heard the big reveal, I can actually hear it both ways, my original, (slightly) mistaken interpretation, and the actual answer.

But it occurs to me that this is exactly how humans learn language. We start by hearing an idealized version, carefully enunciated by parents and primary school teachers, and then we generalize that to more sloppy, noisy renderings in real-life situations, movies, podcasts...

So this experience is reproducible in the large: listen to a foreign language. It's noise. Then learn that language and it stops being noise and takes on meaning. Like the small example, ee efshar lachzor yoter lahatchalah. (That's a latinized transliteration of a Hebrew phrase. Figuring out what it means is left as an exercise :-)

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found it, episode 103, "Desirability Bias" Mind, after several months of not having heard that episode ... I understood the audio immediately. Audio: https://youarenotsosmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/103-... (mp3) Episode: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/07/20/yanss-103-desirabili... When David McRaney says "savour that feeling, because there is no going back ", believe him. There really isn't. The clip, and…

Funny, I was able to wring some sense out of it on second hearing just because I was primed to expect that there was something there. But it turned out not to be quite the right answer. Now that I have heard the big reveal, I can actually hear it both ways, my original, (slightly) mistaken interpretation, and the actual answer. But it occurs to me that this is exactly how humans learn language. We start by hearing an…

bill / pail / mayo

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KiuO_Z2_AD4

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#25

One of may favourite instances of an optical illusion ever is this short video of a cat pouncing on a sheet of paper on which shows an apparent-motions spirals illusion. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=S4IHB3qK1KU It reveals that at least this aspect of feline and human visual perception appears to be similar. As a means of getting inside a cat's head, it's never failed to fascinate me. There's another ... perceptual phenom…

Found it, episode 103, "Desirability Bias" Mind, after several months of not having heard that episode ... I understood the audio immediately. Audio: https://youarenotsosmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/103-... (mp3) Episode: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/07/20/yanss-103-desirabili... When David McRaney says "savour that feeling, because there is no going back ", believe him. There really isn't. The clip, and…

Similar to sibling comment, I understood what the noise was immediately, but I have no way of knowing if it's because I was primed by your comment.

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#28
These were all great. I have a question on the Tube train one though - as someone that has lived over 20 years of his life in London, a lot of them using the Tube, why don't I ever perceive actual Tube trains as going backwards? Or indeed ordinary mainline trains?

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#29
http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html

These 'Illusions' that trick the mind are based on perceptional biases, more or less hard-coded brain structures that gave its ancestors a survival advantage. They had faster reaction times with some out-of-the-box categories and such. They back-propagate information that filters perception.

And its not just those 'Illusions'.

In reality, whatever that is, there aren't any vanishing lines meeting at a vanishing point somewhere around infinity.

But that 2D graphical user interface in your head comes in handy, moving in a higher dimensional (mostly 3, sometimes 4) reality.

So since perception is always subjective illusion (are there any others), science in a sense is parting from Illusions.

Something, one or the other religion, strangely also claims for itself.

Re: Perceptual Illusions (2018)

#30
post #28

These were all great. I have a question on the Tube train one though - as someone that has lived over 20 years of his life in London, a lot of them using the Tube, why don't I ever perceive actual Tube trains as going backwards? Or indeed ordinary mainline trains?

I suspect that the illusion/gif is ambiguous because it's made of just two repeating frames. A "smooth" version of it with more frames would reveal the real direction of the train.
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