Tag Archives: optical illusion

The Impossible Trident Illusion

Look closely: The three prongs miraculously transform into two at the end of the fork. The more you look at it, the more improbable it becomes. How does this happen?

The Troxler Illusion Stare at the centre of the fuzzy image above without blinking. After a few seconds, what do you see? Does the image start to fade away? This visual phenomenon called the Troxler Effect, first discovered by Swiss physician Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler in 1804, reveals how our visual system adapts to sensory stimuli. […]

The Ebbinghaus illusion or Titchener circles is an optical illusion of relative size perception. Named for its discoverer, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), the illusion was popularized in the English-speaking world by Edward B. Titchener in a 1901 textbook of experimental psychology, hence its alternative name.[1] In the best-known version of the illusion, two circles of identical size are placed near to each other, and […]

Focus on the picture and the stairs will change direction every few seconds. It is something that the brain cannot prevent.

The Shepard elephant illusion Also known as L’egs-istential Quandary or the impossible elephant is an optical illusion, of the type of impossible object, based on figure-ground confusion. As its creator Roger Shepard explains:[1] The elephant…belongs to a class of objects that are truly impossible in that the object itself cannot be globally segregated from the nonobject or background. Parts of the object (in this case […]