Remember those crazy pink and white shoes [1] that disrupted your ideas about color or the cafe wall trick [2] that looks like a picture is changing in front of your very eyes? Well, excellent news: there's an new optical illusion here to blow your mind and convince you that everything you know is a lie. And this time, there's science to back it up.
striking illusion is out. open-access. must-read 😀 Curvature Blindness Illusion i-Perception - Kohske Takahashi, 2017 https://t.co/aDtGq1C9Zp [3] pic.twitter.com/Tp2VdkBlTF [4]
— kohske (@kohske) November 24, 2017 [5]
Japanese cognition and illusion researcher Kohske Takahashi published a study [6] about the "Curvature Blindness" phenomenon in the i-Perception science journal, offering up one hell of an illusion. The image, an identical collection of sine curves colored in alternating shades of gray, is simple enough with a white or black background — but when shown against gray, the curves take on an angular appearance on every other line. Check it out:
Image Source: Takahashi (2017) i-Perception [7]
It's wild, right? While Takahashi's full study [8] goes deep into the plausible scientific explanations for this visual phenomenon, the gist is this: our brains likely get downright confused by the color patterns and simply default to perceiving angles because it's easier for them to process.
Sit on that for a minute, and you might begin to question which other things you've "seen" in life are actually lies.
Image Source: IFC [9]
