Hidden dots, strawberries with false colors, cursed dresses that go viral. Optical illusions are everywhere, and today we bring you one more to make your brain scream. Look at the image: some of its lines seem wavy, undulating. The rest present harder diagonals, pure zigzag. What’s the problem? That description is completely wrong…
Optical illusions attract us too much. They are irresistible, and in one way or another we need to know how they work. In some cases (for example, the show of Olga the Headless Woman), the technical details are well known, but once we enter the territory of the human brain, most conclusions are pure speculation.
Want to know what we have for you today? It’s called “The wavy line illusion,” a creation by Professor Kohske Takahashi from Chukyo University in Japan:
The Wavy Line Illusion
The professor, dedicated to the study of cognition and perception, poured his knowledge into this diabolical image. Several pairs of lines, some wavy, others zigzag… but in reality they are all the same
Look closer. The illusion is very powerful in the gray area and the center of the image. In the white region it loses much of its effect, and in the black region it almost completely disappears.
https://old.neoteo.com/funcionan-las-ilusiones-opticas/Another important detail is found in the color of the lines. Those that are wavy change from white to black at the inflection point between curves, while the “diagonals” change at the peaks and lowest points.
Professor Takahashi prepared a series of additional curves and discovered that if the amplitude of the curves is too high or low, the illusion weakens.
To that we must add the influence of contrast. Takahashi thinks that the brain applies different methods to interpret curves and diagonals, and that both “compete”, so to speak.
It is also necessary to highlight a certain three-dimensional profile in the lines that convey the sensation of zigzag. Download a copy of the image, place it in your favorite editor, and zoom to 50 percent. The wavy lines remain flat, but those with the zigzag effect seem to form steps.
In short, the wavy line illusion would be causing a battle in your brain that makes no sense at all, because all the lines are the same. Want to see more? Don’t go too far! We have disguised food, images that disappear, and multiple autostereograms.
Access the study: Click here
