Vision
omnibrain | November 18, 2007A Flickr user took the all the U.S. currencies with buildings on them and lined them up to the real ones in Washington D.C. Pretty cool!
Omni Brain loves these tricks of vision. Check out some more here.
-via Neatorama-
sb admin | October 26, 2007
Dave Kellet jokes about a visual illusion the visual pop-out phenomenon, in his webcomic Sheldon. Click the cropped image to see the full comic strip. Thanks Dave!
[Thanks, T.N. for the correction. Two blog posts about it here and here.]
sb admin | October 12, 2007Via Metacafe, here's an audio/visual illusion involving reading lips and seeing voices (nothing to do with synaesthesia) called the McGurk Effect.
bleimanb | September 28, 2007Birds have the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field, and now scientists believe that they may actually "see" it with their eyes. According to a study posted on PLoS, a molecule known to be in birds' eyes that is sensitive to magnetic fields is directly linked to a part of birds' brains where visual information is processed.
I see London. I see France...
As the study puts it, "In garden warblers, Sylvia borin, the cryptochrome-expressing retinal ganglion cells and a neuronal cluster located in posterolateral regions of both forebrain hemispheres ("Cluster N") show high, sensory-driven…
sb admin | September 18, 2007 The Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest is now accepting submissions for its 2008 prizes. The Neural Correlate Society hosts this fun and popular event now entering its fourth year. Last year's winning illusion will be tough to top!
New this year are the three winners' trophies, designed by sculptor Guido Moretti. The trophies themselves are visual illusions that change shape when you rotate them. Very cool. Click here to see the sculptures' shapes when rotated.
The image above is one of the 2007 entrants, "It's a Circle, Honest!" by David Whitaker. Here's how he created it.
omnibrain | September 17, 2007
I have a project that I could use your help on. Yes... you!
If that didn't get you excited I'm not sure what will ;)
Here's the essentials from the wiki:
Welcome to the Help Steve get his Ph.D. Wiki
This project aims to collect as many distinct scene gists as possible (as a first step - the later steps are classified at the moment!). These are separated into two categories, Scene Gist and Social Gist. A Scene gist is the basic name or category for a scene that does not consist of any humans. You should be able to name the scene nearly instantly as soon as you look at it. For example a jail…
omnibrain | September 17, 2007A ground breaking new study from Florida State University has determined that we look at attractive people! Who woulda thought!
But really:
In a series of three experiments, Maner and his colleagues found that the study participants, all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half of a second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course, but those in committed relationships also checked people out, with one major difference: They were more interested in beautiful people of the same sex.
Ok.. for reals.. It is a pretty interesting…
omnibrain | September 4, 2007Check out these amazing pieces of 3d Fakery in a swimming pool. I'd personally get a 3d shark pool to keep those damn kids out of my yard. Well... at least I would if I were 80 and had a yard with a pool.
omnibrain | August 24, 2007Remember this guy from a few posts ago?!
Nothing is actually wrong with his face. Check out the answer (and another picture) after the break...
Here he is again with a little more telling setup.
According to the website of Lawrence D. Rosenblum and Mike Gordon at UC Riverside:
The point-light technique involves applying small fluorescent yellow cardboard dots to a speaker's face. The dots are affixed to the lips and face with a medical adhesive, and to the teeth and tongue tip with a denture paste. The speaker is videotaped under high-quality fluorescent lighting (seen on left). The…
omnibrain | August 22, 2007
Bet you can't guess what's going on with this guy's face!
I'll give you a hint.... it has to do with psychology.
Give us your best guess and I'll tell you tomorrow why all that crap is all over his face.
omnibrain | August 13, 2007I'm all about the video this morning...This particular animated image drives me up the f'n wall!
neurophilosophy | July 18, 2007
How the brain interprets complex visual scenes is an enduring mystery for researchers. This process occurs extremely rapidly - the "meaning" of a scene is interpreted within 1/20th of a second, and, even though the information processed by the brain may be incomplete, the interpretation is usually correct.
Occasionally, however, visual stimuli are open to interpretation. This is the case with ambiguous figures - images which can be interpreted in more than one way. When an ambiguous image is viewed, a single image impinges upon the retina, but higher order processing in the visual cortex…
omnibrain | April 11, 2007Many famous artists and musicians have had the perception of their own art altered by abnormal physical or mental changes. Critics and historians have often credited these changes as major sources of creativity. Insanity and Drugs seem to usually be the most cited and obvious candidates but very often something a lot more vanilla, like hearing or vision loss, can have the greatest impact on an artists art.
Probably the most famous case of an artist (in this case a musician) losing the one sense that was the most important to their work is Ludwig Van Beethoven. Over the course of the last…