Seeing double: brainwaves offer scientists key to unravelling how optical illusions trick the mind

Here's the Salvador Dali painting used in the study.


By Aussiegirl

Science may have uncovered the brain mechanism that explains optical illusions. This research may also shed light on the brain's ability to recognize faces. I think some people have a greater ability to recognize faces than others, and I've also read research that says that recognition depends in great part on early learning experiences, which explains why to an Asian, all Caucausians look the same, and vice versa. It is not racism, as is so frequently thought. One learns to recognize the subtleties in differences of facial features of people who are familiar to you as you are growing. Like language, once we are grown, the differences are more difficult to learn and detect, just as it is more difficult to learn a language as an adult.

Having been exposed to Asian people in greater numbers in my adult life, I now realize that there are big differences between the general racial features of Japanese, Chinese and Korean people. That is why the recent movie about the geisha was widely criticized when they starred a Chinese actress in the lead role. There is a big difference in racial characteristics between the two groups that Asian people will be quick to pick up. The producers thought that Americans and world audiences would not know the difference.

Scotsman.com News - Entertainment - Arts - Seeing double: brainwaves offer scientists key to unravelling how optical illusions trick the mind

SURREALIST paintings may never be the same again. Scientists have deciphered the secret behind how the brain can be tricked by optical illusions.

Psychologists at Glasgow University used advanced brain-imaging technology to map the brainwaves of volunteers as they looked at surreal images.

They found that the participants' brains absorbed all the information from a painting by breaking it down into separate "brainwaves", tiny electrical impulses in the brain.

But the researchers claim that while all the brainwaves occur at once, the brain is only able to decode one at a time, meaning the volunteers could only concentrate on a single aspect of the painting.

Dr Phillipe Schynes, who led the project, claims this explains why the brain is so easily fooled by optical illusions featuring hidden images that seem difficult to miss once they are noticed.

Examples include the picture where viewers will either see two faces opposing each other or a vase.

Schynes believes the brain has to switch between these brainwaves in order to "see" another part of the image, explaining why people experience a sudden moment of clarity.

He now hopes to use the research to understand why people can recognise faces. He believes that familiar faces trigger brainwaves that are easier for the brain to decode than unfamiliar ones, giving a feeling of recognition.

"We are really examining how the brain processes information and interprets images," he said. "In ambiguous paintings, people will see two possible interpretations of a painting but they will not see both at once.

"The brainwaves associated with one part of a painting may be slow, while another part may be fast. Although both sets of waves are created at the same time, the brain is only sensitive to one at a time, so it has to switch between them in order to see each, but cannot see both at once.

[...]The study used paintings by artist Salvador Dali, who regularly hid images in his paintings as optical illusions, to examine brain activity.

When volunteers stared at his Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, they either saw a scene featuring two nuns at the centre or the face of the great 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire.

They never saw both at once.