Location Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: April 2008
There’s an interesting optical illusion out there called the Spinning Dancer. Follow that link to see it in action.
Now that you’ve done that, tell me, which direction is the dancer spinning? Clockwise? Counter-clockwise?
How about both?
The illusion is carefully crafted so that it works whether you’re seeing it spin one way or the other. Your brain tends to latch on to one orientation, but it is possible to swap between them. Here’s a set of images, one the base image and two showing how the legs are moving given each spin orientation. Just look at either one and then to the base and you’ll be seeing the base spinning that direction.
It’s caused by a combination of a black silhouette meaning we can only see the outline of the dancer and our brain’s internal image processors turning the humanesque shape into a full three-dimensional image of a dancer inside our heads. The poor little brain can’t fully parse out that there are two viable options, and just picks one to make things easier.
