I used to have a page, torn from a magazine, showing a girl's face upside down (no smirking!). She looked really attractive till you turned the page the right way up. I always found it very disturbing and something which I could use to catch other people unawares (ie mindfuck).
It's called the Thatcher Effect, after some grocer's daughter.
Here's a great demo, without Thatcher.
Celebrities Look Better Upside down
And here's another to help explain it.
Head spin trick
Monday, 8 June 2009
Our bizarre perception of reality
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8 comments:
okay, now that I've stood up and turned my head upside down to view those BEFORE they turned over, my neck is hurting! :-)
Oh no...no....nonono..
Now I need a beer.
This effect is among the weirdest things I have ever seen, hence the post.
One of the other weirds is the falling ball illusion, and I first saw that just the other week.
I love the way our minds make interpretations and fill in gaps we are utterly unaware of. I must do a post on the 'blind spots' in our eyes.
(Another weird thing is that I'm drinkining Marston's Pedigree tonight! Found it in the cheap aisle)
I saw the ball thingy when you posted it - bloody amazing !
Even more amazing (and weirder than your pedigree) is the fact that I have no beer in the house at all tonight.... not a drop.
Remarkable.
Unimaginable!
I love the way our minds make interpretations and fill in gaps we are utterly unaware of. I must do a post on the 'blind spots' in our eyes.
.
Once upon a time I taught university-level cognitive psychology. The main message I tried to get across to the students was "Perception is a construction in the head of the perceiver." IOW, we don't perceive the outside world, we construct a representation of it in our heads.
RBH
I remember an odd hippy term I have used: 'maya'.
It kinda means our minds assimilate stimuli from the outside world, interpret them, and then cast it all back outside ourselves and call it reality.
So I'd be about 17yo and full of LSD and hashish, battling out the meaning of life with my peers. Or so we thought. But this idea of maya has always been a calming influence on me and made me question everything.
Sadly, illicit drug users these days don't seem to discuss psychology or religion or the nature of time etc. Or is that just my own maya?
Nothing's like it was in the good old days. :)
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