Spinning Dancer
It’s 8/8/08, and I’m in a symmetrical mood. Enjoy this animation, created by Nobuyuki Kayahara, of a spinning dancer, and ask yourself this question: Is she spinning in a clockwise direction, or a counter-clockwise direction?
I’ll be honest: this picture freaks me out. Sometimes, she’s spinning clockwise; sometimes she’s spinning counter-clockwise. Sometimes her left foot stays on the ground; sometimes, it’s her right.
According to Yami McMoots, this is an example of bistable perception. There’s not enough information in the image to tell for sure which direction she’s really turning. But we can recognize a human when we see one. “When presented with stimuli that have two valid, mutually contradictory interpretations, your brain just picks one. Then, sometimes, it picks the other.”
I thought this was a hoax at first, and that the animation actually spins both ways, but this site set me straight. We can see the dancer as spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise, but our brains won’t allow us to see the ambiguity. Once we see what we identify as a human figure, our brains fill in all of the missing details. That’s why we can make smiley faces with punctuation marks.
:-)
It’s also why the effect of this Charlie Chaplin mask (via Mighty Optical Illusions) is so eerie.
August 15th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
This fascinating. Is it an explanation for cognitive dissonance too?
August 15th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Well, yes and no…