I hear the term ‘right brained’ 'left brained often and wonder what’s behind this. Could you do an EEG and see one hemi lit up more than the other? Say you EEGd an accountant and an artist, would their brains show hemi activity opposite of each other?
Do some people operate with hemi sync’d brain? If so, is there any benefits to having bother sides lit up? Can you consciously switch from left to right or light them both up at will?
The illusion has nothing to do with the hemispheres of the brain. That article is bullshit.
No. (Incidentally, the best way to do such an experiment would be with fMRI, not EEG, but the answer is still no.)
Again, no. Most of the stuff you will read in the popular media about left and right brain is bullshit. Most of the machinery subserving language is in the left hemisphere. Otherwise, the differences between the hemispheres are quite subtle and minor, and we all use both of them all the time.
The image contains insufficient visual cues to be able to absolutely determine the direction of rotation, so your brain has to assume one direction or the other - but that assumption is difficult to dispel (because there is insufficient data to make this happen).
Our visual system makes, then relies upon assumptions all the time - and for the most part, this is expedient - optical illusions like this one explore the gaps between reality and our normal perception of it.
BTW, one of the easiest ways to force your brain to see the rotation change direction is to imagine yourself as looking upwards at the figure (as through a glass ceiling), or looking down on it from above.
The easiest way to change the rotation is to stare at her left foot until it looks like she is swinging her right leg back and forth (that you see with your peripheral vision) and then simply look up when its heading in the direction you want it to rotate in.
Sort of, although that really was a big generalisation - different optical illusions exploit different aspects of the gap between reality and our perception of it, and exploit those gaps in different ways - they’re not necessarily all the same kind of phenomenon as each other.
Actually, no. The dancer is hopping up and down on her right foot and she’s rotating counter-clockwise with an extended left foot. I think I pointed this out the last time we discussed this image.
The figure is backlit. The shadow of the raised left foot only comes into view when the extended left foot is away from us as she is rotating counterclockwise at the top of her jump. When she is at the bottom of the jump the left foot is extended toward us and so the shadow of the left foot is too far in the foreground to appear in the frame.
Were she rotating clockwise (the way my brain prefers to see her unless I make the image switch directions), the shadow of the extended foot (which would be her right foot if she were rotating clockwise) would come into the image when her back is toward us and her extended right foot is closer to the backlight. In fact, it does just the opposite, given us enough visual information to determine her actual rotation, and the fact that she is hopping up and down on her right foot while twirling counter-clockwise with an extended left foot.
Perhaps a focus on an unusually…umm…generous (for a dancer) upper part of the image distracts from seeing this simple visual cue.
OK, The image contains insufficient visual cues to enable your perceptual system to reliably determine the direction of rotation, so your brain has to assume one direction or the other. Whether or not the image can be scrutinised in depth to gain insight into the true direction of rotation is a separate matter to the question of what happens when you look at it. My bad for using ‘absolute’ when I meant something else.
The shadow thing is bogus anyway - I don’t think it’s even part of the original rendering - it looks to me more like a Web 2.0-style effect added on afterwards (and I see it as a reflection)
According to the article most people will see the dancer as rotating anti-clockwise. I see her as going clockwise, although with effort I can temporarily make her change direction. According to the article, this would be due to the fact that I am left-handed. and therefore right-brain dominant.
Is there a correlation between dominant hand and the turning direction of the dancer?
FWIW I find the easiest way to make the dancer change direction is to close your eyes for a second, imagine her rotating in the opposite way to however you last perceived, then open them. Bitchslap your brain!
Technically, what we are talking about here are known as ambiguous figures (or bistable figures) rather than optical illusions, but yeah, but yeah, ambiguous figures that don’t move, such as the Necker cube and the duck-rabbit work much the same way.
No. As already stated, the article is bullcrap. Personally, I can make the direction change pretty easily, often just by blinking. I suspect that the direction one experiences is pretty much random, but once you get stuck in seeing it one way it can be difficult to get it to swap over. I suggest that you try looking at it a few more times (taking a break in between). My guess is that you won’t find that clockwise seems dominant every time.
