The illusion comes into play when an object is placed along the borders of each successive shade. Something strange occurs with our perception of the obvious difference in shades. In fact, neighboring shades appear to be precisely the same!
Here's a video that showcases the full effect of the illusion:
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Signing UpStep 1What You Need
1) A sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper
2) Scissors
3) Pencil
4) A program that you can draw in (i.e. Photoshop, Paint, etc.)
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I wouldn't be surprised if this was a pre-processing phenomenon, related to the cells near the eye that encode information for the brain. They perform lots of strange compression schemes on all our input data, and many of them are line-based.
I want to take that class!
You may have learned in the class that our brains basically put contrasts ahead of color tones (in terms of priority of processing). This illusion takes advantage of that when the pencil covers the contrast areas. Since there is no contrast perceived, we see the same tone when the two tones are just slighty different. Obviously, when the contrast is then revealed, we can suddenly perceive the difference in tones. That's the best way I can describe the phenomenon right now.
Thanks so much for viewing and commenting!
dissapeared literally before our eyes. It just became less and less opaque, but it was timed perfectly. Any faster and we would have seen it. It blew our minds.
The class was called "Introduction to Cognitive Science." We were told that very few schools teach Cognitive Science explicitly. It was the absolute best class I have ever taken. On of my projects was to design the neural architecture of an insect. I recommend taking a class on it, or reading a book about it if you can.
Cheers!
Cognitive science is so fascinating, I like to delve into it in my spare time.
That sounds like an amazing class that you took, and the video you mentioned really sounds neat. You don't happen to know the name of the video, do you (or know where or how I could somehow find/watch it )?
Cheers.
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/
http://www.johnsadowski.com/big_spanish_castle.html#
:-O
What if you covered ALL the lines? THAT would be interesting. I'll try that.
That is...
...gosh!
(Can anybody explain this? There must be a huge project on colour-perception in this for any college or university students out there!)