I am about to show you a simple doctored photograph of a woman’s face. But it has been so artfully rearranged that your brain will insist that your eyes are malfunctioning somehow and it will fight to resolve the image into something that it isn’t. If you’re anything like me, this process will give you a headache very quickly. It all goes to show what an active process seeing is. You think you’re just passively taking in the world, but in fact you’re busy busy busy constructing it all the time. It takes an illusion like this to drive that point home.
Here you go: Are U drunk.
If I look at that picture for about five seconds (which in actual passing is a lot longer than you think when you read “five seconds”) I get to feeling like, if I were to look at it for another five seconds, I might get close to actually barfing.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at the pic for more than five seconds at a shot.
In fact it’s been maybe two minutes since I looked and I still have this weird feeling of tightness and/or disorientation in between my eyes in the center of my head.
Wow.
I think I met her in a bar once. But I think I was too drunk to tell that something was wrong. Freaky!