Trick or Science? Short Right/Left Brain Eye Test

Soniclight wrote on 11/23/2007, 5:33 PM
Someone referred me to a very short article. The list of left-brain/right-brain characteristics are known stuff and it's not why I'm posting this. It's about the the dancer in simple animation and the introductory challenge in the first two sentences of the short article:

It suggests that you can actually make her pirouette or gyration change direction with your mind.

"Yeah, right," I thought, [i]"this must be some gimmick."

But I focused on the turning silhouette for a few minutes, carefully counting the times she turned one way, then the other looking for a pattern. But it seems to never be the same number of gyrations either way.

Then, the video editor/detective/nit-picker in me kicked in:

"OK, it's probably some trick in the file, some long clip with various gyration direction edits that just seem to be random..." Fortunately, it's a .gif file, so I saved and popped it into VP8 hoping to find the sneaky edits.

Well, I couldn't because...
It's only a 1 second clip = she can only turn once in the entire file!

So how can "she" change directions at random like that? Is this in a way analogous to quantum theory stating that the observer changes what is observed?

You decide.

Try it out on your next coffee break and watch your brain synapses play some perceptual tricks on you too :) Some day such scientific "trickery" may affect video-editing and film itself, who knows.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 11/23/2007, 5:38 PM
My boss had that running on her screen for a couple hours last week while we all tried staring at it. I must have an odd perception system. I was able to interpret her motion either direction at will. I'm also able to see it for what it is, an undulating 2 dimentional shape that isn't turning at all.
ChristoC wrote on 11/23/2007, 5:39 PM
I watched her for 20 mins hoping someone would come along and turn the lights on.
Soniclight wrote on 11/23/2007, 5:45 PM
On undulation vs. spin:

I did a very slow manual scrub in Pan/Crop and she seems only to turn 180 degrees one way, then back the other way. And true, it's 2-D masquerading as 3-D, but the perception woo-woo is still pretty cool.

As to the the lights going on, well, that would take most (male) viewers attention away from the point of the science and devolve into something else (demure porn?) - lol.
crocdoc wrote on 11/23/2007, 7:10 PM
very very interesting.

I've always considered myself to be fairly evenly split right brain/left brain. I'm a scientist by training but my career has also involved me working as an artist/illustrator for many years. No matter how long I stare at the dancer, she only rotates clockwise.

... but this is where it gets really strange. There is a mirror to the right of my computer. If I look at the image in the mirror, she is STILL rotating clockwise. It's incredibly strange to watch the computer image and the mirror image moving in the same direction rather than in mirrored directions!
bigrock wrote on 11/23/2007, 7:47 PM
I always seeing it spinning clockwise when I look at, meaning I precieve the normal world with my right brain. However if I focus away from the picture a few inches it always spins counterclockwise meaning the I perceive the freaky paranoid world where ghosts and goblins and the Nomads live with my left brain.

p.s. If you want to know who the Nomads are look up the Pierce Brosnan movie of the same.

BigRockies.com Your Home in the Rockies!
deusx wrote on 11/23/2007, 8:01 PM
Didn't have enough time to make her spin the other way, and I don't believe in these tests anyway.

Interesting thing though. A couple of FCP editors here, couldn't decide which way she was spinning, they had to e-mail Apple support and ask them. They should have an answer in a couple of days.

I think it's a trick though. I could see her turning counterclockwise, then look away for a second, and look back, now she was turning clockwise. Either my brain just switches from one side to the other at will, or this is just a trick and it depends on when you start looking at her rotation.
Harold Brown wrote on 11/24/2007, 10:04 AM
I see both. I watch it and after 20 seconds or so I see it switch and after a short period of time I see it switch back. My wife has the same experience but not in sync when I see it change. I am right handed and my wife is left handed. So it is junk.
UKAndrewC wrote on 11/24/2007, 10:57 AM
It's a great illusion but it isn't based on hemispheric dominance. It's based on persistance of vision.

When you see the first few frames (from when you look, not the beginning of the file) your brain decides it's going one way or the other.

If your persistance of vision tells you that the last frame was to the left and as it doesn't obviously change direction, the next frame must be movement in the same direction.

Nice example to demostrate how bs attempts to baffle brains though ;-)

Andrew
epirb wrote on 11/24/2007, 11:18 AM
ok i wasnt sure if it was a trick either with the gif file,, so i taped it with my cam, calling out which way she was rotating for 5 mins. each time she changed directions i woud say it . ...watched the tape back and what i observed on the tape was hardly ever in sync w what i was saying on the tape.
bizarro.... i could not make it change at will and mostly it/she was clockwise. tried different though patterns ie thinking analyticly about it, staring ...uh humm "concentrating" on different parts of her ....didnt seem to make a difference, least not in th eway she was rotating :-)

after a little observance i did figure out that if l ilooked at the "shadow" of her raised foot and concaentrate on that. she just moves back and forth and maintains that dorectione when you look up , waht the shadow again and you can Chosse which way shes spinning. I think the above posted is correct its more visual perception than brain sides..
GlennChan wrote on 11/24/2007, 12:38 PM
Mainstream academic psychology doesn't really buy into the idea of left brain versus right brain. You mostly need both sides of the brain working together for many functions... e.g. many tasks are partly handled in the other side of the brain. And neither side really dominates over the other... people have both creative + logical qualities to them.

2- As for the illusion itself... that's pretty cool. Some discussion of it here, and a better demonstration
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/sze_silhouette/index.html
Bill Ravens wrote on 11/24/2007, 1:43 PM
you guys see an undulating, spinning woman?
it looks like two fighting bulldogs to me
Soniclight wrote on 11/25/2007, 12:58 PM
"you guys see an undulating, spinning woman?

Hmmm...

Must be some subconscious or latent aggression/conflict showing through about some nekked woman in your life? :)

rmack350 wrote on 11/25/2007, 1:09 PM
Kelly said: "I'm also able to see it for what it is, an undulating 2 dimentional shape that isn't turning at all."

That sounds a bit like sitting in a theater and listening to the hubbub as a whole rather than focusing on the words you can pick out. It's a conscious act of not trying to draw meaning from what you perceive. (and I think that's the true spirit of scientific observation).

Rob Mack
John_Cline wrote on 11/25/2007, 1:55 PM
The "reconstruction" that the brain undertakes to fill in the missing dimension is called "Gestalt" psychology (I'm sure most of you knew that)...it's the same mechanism that the brain employes when we see something partially hidden behind another object and we try to complete the picture of what the unsee-able portion of the object looks like, similar to seeing partial letters spelling out a word or sentence and our brain fills in the missing gaps of the letters so that the series of letters "makes sense" to us. It's fascinating stuff, really. Creating the illusion of three dimensions in a two dimensional medium (like television) is something we've all been doing for years.
Randy Brown wrote on 11/25/2007, 1:59 PM
ROTFL
ChristoC wrote on 11/25/2007, 2:15 PM
>>you guys see an undulating, spinning woman?
>>it looks like two fighting bulldogs to me

Barking mad??
Arthk wrote on 11/25/2007, 3:03 PM
I am ambidextrous,
and change it at will, as easy as turning a page in a book.