Tactile illusions: Seven ways to fool your sense of touch - New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/special/tactile-illusions
Trippy illusion - Boing Boing
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/10/trippy-illusion.html

una imagen casi hipnotica que hace que uno vea todo muy raro luego de verlo 10 minutos

Illustration of why curveballs seem to suddenly drop.

Optical illusion

Our illusions suggest that the perceived “break” may be caused by the transition from the central visual system to the peripheral visual system. Like a curveball, the spinning disks in the illusions appear to abruptly change direction when an observer switches from foveal to peripheral viewing.

"Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world," says Macknik, lead author of the paper. "Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level." By reverse-engineering these deceptions, Macknik hopes to illuminate the mental loopholes that make us see a woman get sawed in half or a rabbit appear out of thin air even when we know such stuff is impossible. "Magicians were taking advantage of these cognitive illusions long before any scientist identified them," Martinez-Conde says.

GReader: Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion http://ow.ly/5xUu [from http://twitter.com/ChipRiley/statuses/1725035126]

Retweeting @copyblogger: Penn & Teller Reveal the Neuroscience of Illusion - http://is.gd/vRUV [from http://twitter.com/apoorvgadwal/statuses/1698147950]

""People take reality for granted," Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. "Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple." For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli."

The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral , the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily we can be fooled.

Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen.

うわあああこの緑と青、同じ色だって

Nw1AS.jpg (JPEG-kuva, 950×848 kuvapistettä)

ganzfeld procedure, inverted binoculars painkiller, rubber hand illusion, pinocchia illusion, purkinje lights

miniatue illusion

Using Photoshop and Your Brain to Produce Diorama Illusions

visual and audio mind benders

Color illusion 12

RT @nealchambers: Non-photoshoped images that play on prospective http://su.pr/2giZAS - people can be very creative. [from http://twitter.com/daylemajor/statuses/3878526011]

Not Photoshopped: Just Incredible Forced Perspective Photography http://ow.ly/oOZM [from http://twitter.com/10minuteexpert/statuses/3888596246]

Hyvä video optisista harhoista.

TED Talk, fascinating as always...

TED presentation on optical illusions - explanation that they are not failures of the senses, but simply the brain taking empirical and historical data it has gathered from other experiences that have been useful and analyzing data it receives. TL;DR - information has only the meaning we give it.

If you’ve ever felt like you go a little cross-eyed after taking a peek at an optical illusion, then you know they can be a pretty intense phenomenon. What your eyes perceive when looking at one of these images is actually a visual illusion; you see

Acid Cat

This is great!! Found via Mental Floss.

Crossing circles... sorta. :-)

Alexa Meade thinks completely backwards. Most artists use acrylic paints to create portraits of people on canvas. But not Meade - she applies acrylic paints on her subjects and makes them appear to be a part of the painting! Meade is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC area. Her innovative use of paint on the three dimensional surfaces of found objects, live models, and architectural spaces has been incorporated into a series of installations that create a perceptual shift in how we experience and interpret spatial relationships. I was lucky enough to catch up with Meade and ask her about her thought process behind this creative work. Here is what she said: "I paint representational portraits directly on top of the people I am representing. The models are transformed into embodiments of the artist's interpretation of their essence. When captured on film, the living, breathing people underneath the paint disappear, overshadowed by the masks of themselves."

motion induced blindness, optical illusion, rotating array, yellow dots, green dot