NOVA Online | Secrets of the Mind

Visual Mind Games

Like a tiny, ever-alert judge seated inside your head, your brain is constantly making decisions about evidence brought to it by way of your senses, to give you as clear an understanding as possible of what you're seeing, feeling, tasting, and so on. Sometimes you can catch your brain trying to, well, make up its mind about how to present such information. Here we offer a series of optical brainteasers culled from Phantoms in the Brain, by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. Note: While looking at the graphics, we suggest you move your cursor off the screen so it's not distracting. For more on Ramachandran's groundbreaking work on the brain, see From Ramachandran's Notebook.

		Necker cube				Blind-spot demonstration #2

		Eggs and cavities				Blind-spot demonstration #3

		Size-contrast illusion				Blind-spot demonstration #4

		Blind-spot demonstration #1				Blind-spot demonstration #5

With slight modifications, the graphics and captions above were excerpted with permission from Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (Quill/William Morrow, 1998).

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