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<\/CENTER><\/p>\nI’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.<\/p>\n
According to Yami McMoots<\/a>, 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.”<\/p>\n I thought this was a hoax at first, and that the animation actually spins both ways, but this site<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n :-)<\/p>\n It’s also why the effect of this Charlie Chaplin mask (via Mighty Optical Illusions<\/a>) is so eerie.<\/p>\n