
Can you make your brain not see this circle illusion? - sohkamyung
http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/can-you-make-your-brain-not-see-this-circle-illusion
======
fenomas
Illusions like this always remind me of failure modes of image classifiers -
where an AI thinks a sunflower is a panda or whatever, because it's never seen
a sunflower before.

That is, presumably the illusion works because it depicts something we've
never needed to distinguish before, in such a way that it shares salient
features with something more familiar (in this case, oddly-textured concentric
rings and normally textured spirals, respectively). Or am I spouting nonsense?

~~~
amelius
I wonder why evolution has not exploited this more.

~~~
teddythetwig
It has, think about natural camouflage like zebras. It short circuits the
predators ability to pick out individual herd members.

~~~
brute
Minor correction: Predators like lions have no problem distinguishing
individual members of a herd. The stripes pattern messes with the way blood-
sucking, disease-spreading flies (such as horse flies or tsetse flies) see the
world.

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbzwpv/the-
reason...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbzwpv/the-reason-
zebras-have-stripes-isnt-what-you-think)

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SAI_Peregrinus
The illusion creator's homepage is an old favorite of mine.

[http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html](http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html)

The illusions discussed in the article are the Cyanophyceae under the shape
illusions category.

~~~
sillysaurus3
[http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/ACSwamp2010.jpg](http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/ACSwamp2010.jpg)
got me. But there's a catch: it only works when you scroll. So you have to go
to
[http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html](http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html)
and scroll down till you see it. It looks bizarre.

~~~
duskwuff
Wow, and it doesn't even require color. There's a grayscale illusion which
behaves similarly -- maybe even a bit stronger! -- at:

[http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/mesh-
driftillusion01...](http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/mesh-
driftillusion01.jpg)

------
vacri
> _Yup. Those aren’t spirals. They’re all concentric circles._

Except they are spirals. The black patches form the implication of a spiral -
this is where your visual system picks out the spiral from.

If you were to say that there are _technically_ no spirals in that image
because they're not contiguous, then you could equally say that there are
_technically_ no circles either, only an arrangement of square boxes that is
strongly suggestive of a circle.

Either way, it's a very powerful illusion.

~~~
qbrass
>If you were to say that there are technically no spirals in that image
because they're not contiguous, then you could equally say that there are
technically no circles either, only an arrangement of square boxes that is
strongly suggestive of a circle.

There are circles though. The grey concentric rings.

If you removed them, you'd see the black and white pattern spirals towards the
center.

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kkylin
If you like this sort of thing, and haven't heard of the McGurk Effect before,
take a look at this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0)
.

~~~
thoughtsimple
Wow. I can close my eyes and picture the two different speech patterns and
hear different results. Bizarre.

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SubiculumCode
Focus on the gray, and let your mind put it as the foreground, and circles,
let them be a low frequency background. It may be your best chance to _not_
see the illusion.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Worked for me on the squared circle but took concentration on the spiral. It
changed as I looked at it but not like before. Different ways of focusing on
it made it go static vs moving.

What made you recommend that?

~~~
TuringTest
Negative space is easy to see when you focus on it. In these examples, the
negative space is flat color, so it's not affected by the illusion.

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0xbear
It's like generative adversarial samples for biological neural nets. I wonder
is someone could weaponize this so if would cause lasting dizziness and
disorientation after a prolonged exposure.

~~~
martin_ky
Similar device was used in the sci-fi novel Snow Crash. It appeared like a
black and white image of static but in fact contained a subliminal message
which tapped into some subconscious low-level cognitive functions of the
brain. Just by looking at it, it reprogrammed the victim's brain and made them
into a mindless zombie.

~~~
mintplant
See also: BLIT

[http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm)

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gcatalfamo
The illusions are cool and study worthy, but the "you will never believe
this!!!" tone of the articles is major turnoff.

~~~
robbrown451
Well, it's Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, and it's kind of his style.

I like his style, but I knew him when we were in elementary school together
back in the early 70's (he was into telescopes and stuff even then), so I cut
him some slack.

~~~
Sharlin
Yeah. Despite the style, he's strictly no nonsense (after all, the original
point of his blog and website was to refute bad astronomy in popular media.

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mcbits
If you cover one eye and look at the image of two concentric circles, it gives
a slightly exaggerated illustration of how I see text with both eyes open due
to misalignment. That's why I hate two-space indentation with a passion.
Saving this for the next tabs vs. spaces debate.

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bsenftner
Reminds me of the camouflage on some spiders. I wonder if their markings
invoke that illusion?

~~~
ams6110
I thought it looked like snakeskin. And then wondered about evolutionary
adaptation, i.e. making it harder for predators to accurately see where the
snake is.

~~~
noir_lord
I love this stuff.

Was reading about a dinosaur discovery that allowed them to project
colouration, turns out the bottom was brighter than the top, an adaptation
prey has so that their shadow is the same brightness as their top half, deer
have the same adaptation, evolution is amazing!

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BurningFrog
These illusions must be bugs in our image perception hardware that evolution
hasn't sorted out for some reason.

It would be interesting to know if some people don't get fooled by them, and
if so how they're different in other ways.

Also, do other species react like we do? How do you design an experiment for
that?

Finally, I wonder if this can be used practically. Some kind of camouflage
maybe?

~~~
b6
> Also, do other species react like we do?

Cats seem to see the squirming snakes.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcXXQ6GCUb8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcXXQ6GCUb8)

~~~
ghusbands
Cats play like that with blank sheets of paper on soft surfaces, too, due to
the crinkling noises, so the evidence is insufficient.

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paulcole
What is up with the dot on the screen?

~~~
dingo_bat
Looks like js gone rogue.

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FRex
The rounded corners rectangle looking one gave me the idea of using these for
parts of the UI.. good thing I'm not a UI or web designer I guess!

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jmull
Oh my god.

I normally find optical illusions interesting and fun. Here it's like the fun
guy at the party has had too much to drink and is now obnoxious and a bit
nauseating.

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arihant
Focussing on the negative gray color in between circles gives it away. Still
requires extreme focus to figure out the spiral.

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bshimmin
Out of interest, is there anyone for whom these illusions _don 't_ work?

~~~
zerofennec
_raises hand_ I've been doing 3D modeling and photo manipulation for over a
decade. I learned to dismantle these illusions, focusing more on the "how"
than the "wow". I've dabbled in making illusions.
[http://imgur.com/J3kSB1c](http://imgur.com/J3kSB1c)

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strictnein
The five parallel lines farther down the page were giving me a headache. Ugh

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quirkot
This is pretty much the basis of contouring makeup

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tankenmate
There are two words I think explain why this effect is so strong in humans;
survival, snake.

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steanne
yes. but then, i perceived the dress as blue and gold, too.

~~~
jstanley
Blue and gold?? Surely it should be blue and black or white and gold?

~~~
steanne
yep. those are either both wrong or both right. i haven't heard of anyone else
who got it half right.

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c3534l
This reminds me of visualizations of neural network layers in visual tasks.

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martin_ky
This effect is kind of similar to what makes subpixel font rendering look
horrible when the wrong LCD subpixel order is selected. Or why text looks
jaggy on pentile displays, especially while scrolling.

