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Illusions
Psychology 101-U1H
2/19/2008
 Is seeing believing or do you have to believe to see? Illusions only make these questions harder for some people. They see the illusions and think these things must be happening but hey don’t realize that the way these things are happening may not have anything to do with the picture moving or changing but with the movement of their eyes or the cones in their eyes.
Some claim to have seen hosts when all they have seen is an afterimage of something else. An afterimage is an image that stays with you even after you have stopped looking at an object.
There is an example of this with two birds and a bird cage. The bird on the left is red and after u stop starring at it and look at the birdcage you will see a blue/green bird in the cage. This is because of the cones in your eyes. The red/blue cones are working only switched on red when u are looking at the red bird and when u look away from it the red part of the cone rests so the green kicks on to even it out in a way. The same goes for when u look at the green for a long time and then see the rd bird when u look at the cage.
There is an exhibit at the Exploratorium that has two paintings of Mona Lisa upside down and they look pretty much the same. When they are turned over though, you can see that the one on the left is normal and the one on the right is distorted and ugly.
Not noticing the distortion when they are upside down is normal. People don’t notice because the picture is already at an odd angle to them so they don’t realize the minor imperfections about it until it is flipped back over.
They distorted the picture by flipping the mouth and eyes around so it wasn’t completely noticeable until the viewer sees the painting from a familiar angle.
Finally there is also the waterfall effect which is exhibited by watching a group of dots rotate quickly in one direction for 20 seconds and then looking at...