2 optical illusions...in the PhD category

Many online opicial illusions are cheap and cheesy..but many are profound..

1)I found this one  (created by Aude Oliva , PhD of Massachssets Institute of Technology) in Brian Greene (PhD)'s "The Hidden Reality."  The idea is that from up close, it looks like Einstein, but from a distance, it morphs into Marilyn Monroe.  Greene uses it to illustrate : "The morphing from Einstein to Monroe is amazing.  The morphing of one string theory into another is transformative...Calculations that are impossibly difficult from one perspective become perfectly doable from another."  (p.111)

2)The illusion below was created by Jordan Suchow, a Harvard University graduate student, and George Alvarez, an assistant professor in Harvard's psychology department,  and is called "Silencing awareness of change by background motion."  From the papper, Suchow, J.W. & Alvarez, G.A. (2011). Motion silences awareness of visual change. Current Biology, 21, 140–143:

 A blog from Scientific American helps to explain what's going on. If you focus on the white dot in the center of the screen, the rotating dots appear to stop changing color. But, in reality, the dots continue to change during the video. "Their spinning motion somehow suppresses the viewer's ability to detect those changes."  link

That will preach!!


This connected for me to my posts, with plenty of examples of "centered sets with moving center" (centered sets with moving center,   moving center part 2 ,  

moving center part 3, and 

Centered sets are not an optical illusion)

1. 
   
   

See also some

liminal space

 illusions