Tag Archives | Illusions

Scholar: Resurrection Of Christ Was An Optical Illusion

By on April 6, 2012 in News 32

article-2121149-000BD5CF00000258-954_468x445Basically, the claim is that Jesus’s rising from the dead circa 2,000 years ago happened much in the same way as his being spotted in potato chips today. The Daily Mail writes:

A sensational new theory about the Turin Shroud claims to destroy the core belief of Christianity – that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Art historian Thomas de Wesselow is convinced the Shroud is real and did touch Christ’s body. But the Cambridge academic insists that the image on the cloth fooled the Apostles into believing Christ had come back to life, and the Resurrection was in fact an optical illusion.

His theory is that in the mind of a person 2,000 years ago, the image on the Shroud would have been astonishing – far beyond their normal experiences and truly unsettling. ‘They saw the image on the cloth as the living double of Jesus,’ he said. ‘Back then images had a psychological presence, they were seen as part of a separate plain of existence, as having a life of their own.’

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Frustro: The Impossible Typeface

By on April 3, 2012 in News 5

Imagine the experience of reading something printed in Frustro…a font that captures the illusory nature of our daily world. Hopefully available for your use soon, it was conceived to perfectly embody impossibility. Via Jeannie Jeannie:

Hungarian designer Martzi Hegedűs has created a single typeface, titled Frustro, on the sole premise of making it impossible. He imagined each letter as an extension of the Penrose triangle (an impossible object whose creator deemed it “impossibility in its purest form”) the type appears to be facing two different directions simultaneously.

frustrotype

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Schizophrenia Experiment Produces First Repeatable Out-of-Body Experience in the Laboratory

By on November 2, 2011 in News 1

Rubber HandVia ScienceDaily:

A study using a procedure called the rubber hand illusion has found striking new evidence that people experiencing schizophrenia have a weakened sense of body ownership and has produced the first case of a spontaneous, out-of-body experience in the laboratory.

These findings suggest that movement therapy, which trains people to be focused and centered on their own bodies, including some forms of yoga and dance, could be helpful for many of the 2.2 million people in the United States who suffer from this mental disorder.

The study, which appears in the Oct. 31 issue of the scientific journal Public Library of Science One, measured the strength of body ownership of 24 schizophrenia patients and 21 matched control subjects by testing their susceptibility to the “rubber hand illusion” or RHI. This tactile illusion, which was discovered in 1998, is induced by simultaneously stroking a visible rubber hand and the subject’s hidden hand.

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The Terrifying Hollow Face Illusion (Video)

By on September 18, 2011 in News 16

Hollow FaceGreat find from Esther Inglis-Arkell on io9.com:

Stephen Fry and the panelists on the BBC show QI are struck by the strange motions of the inverted face of Albert Einstein demonstrating the Hollow Face Illusion, and a little side-variation of the illusion.

We’ve told you about the Hollow Face Illusion before. This illusion involves a sculpted face, but instead of the usual convex human face of a sculpture, the sculpture is flipped and we’re shown the inside of the face. In this case, it looks like Einstein stuck his face in some molten plastic and we’re looking at the impression.

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The Semi-Genius Of Illusion Illusions

By on August 3, 2011 in News 6

Is the center circle at left larger than the center circle at right? How about this: are there gray spots between the corners of black squares?

Illusions are tricks that play off of the ways our brains typically process sensory information. The problem is that many of them have become clichéd. Hence illusion illusions — illusions that play off of the illusions we’re used to seeing. See the angry-comment-provoking Flickr set.

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Does This Man’s House Look Like Hitler?

By on April 4, 2011 in News 31

Hilter HouseRichard Alleyne writes in the Telegraph:

Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed or shared the link to a photograph of the house after it was published on Twitter, the social networking site.

The slanted roof was said to resemble the Hitler fringe, the door lintel was the moustache and the small top windows were seen as the dictator’s piercing eyes.

The joke took off when it was tweeted by Jimmy Carr, the comedian, but the owner of the house in Port Tenant, Swansea, a man in his 70s, said he had never even heard of Twitter.

The tweet was first posted by Charli Dickenson, 22, a youth worker, who spotted the bizarre similarity as she drove past.

“I walk past the house all the time, but I had never noticed the Hitler likeness before,” said Miss Dickenson. “But then, at the weekend, I was in the car with my boyfriend and we were stuck in traffic and I just said to him, ‘That house looks like Hitler.’ We both laughed.

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World’s Oldest Optical Illusion Found?

By on December 26, 2010 in News 0

Bison or Mammoth?This is interesting. I wonder how they relate to the therianthropes found in cave paintings popularized by Graham Hancock and others. Andrew Howley writes on NatGeo News:

Prehistoric artists were creating mind-bending double images of their own, according to a new paper presented earlier this year at an international convention on rock art research.

The paper’s author, Duncan Caldwell has surveyed the Paleolithic art of several caves in France and discovered a recurring theme that he says can’t be simply accidental. Throughout the cave of Font-de-Gaume, and in examples from other sites as well, drawings and engravings of woolly mammoths and bison often share certain lines or other features, creating overlapping images that can be read first as one animal, then the other. Rarely, if ever, do they do the same with other animals.

While images of horses, deer, extinct cattle, and even rhinos often appear in such caves, and often partially or entirely overlap each other, it is only the mammoth-bison pair that Caldwell found regularly appearing superimposed so exactly.

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Physicists Devise Way to Test Whether We’re Really Living in a Hologram

By on October 26, 2010 in News 1

Hologram Universe?Interesting post from Sara Reardon in Symmetry (A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication):

In 2008, Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan made waves with a mind-boggling proposition: The 3D universe in which we appear to live is no more than a hologram. Now he is building the most precise clock of all time to directly measure whether our reality is an illusion.

The idea that spacetime may not be entirely smooth — like a digital image that becomes increasingly pixelated as you zoom in – had been previously proposed by Stephen Hawking and others. Possible evidence for this model appeared last year in the unaccountable “noise” plaguing the GEO600 experiment in Germany, which searches for gravitational waves from black holes. To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon the lower limit of the spacetime pixels’ resolution.

Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist at all.

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