Here is an amazing optical illusion making rounds in the blogosphere, about a spinning dancer and the direction of her rotation. I have observed it for a long time, at different times. I have even observed it with another person, and found me seeing it spin clockwise and my partner anti-clockwise. While most of the time it appears to be spinning clockwise, it sometimes appears anti-clockwise!
Update 1
Steve Levitt solicited responses from 219 people on relation between left/right brains and perception of spin direction. The results are posted in Freakonomics blog. The results are interestingly enough, exactly the opposite of what the spinning dancer blog suggests.
The breakdown of responses is given below, indicating the percentage of respondents who initially sees her spinning counter-clockwise. The higher this number, the more rational you are supposed to be (with the number of observations in parentheses):
Engineers/mathematicians/computer programmers: 21.8% (N=55)
Economists: 26.7% (N=60)
Scientists: 31.0% (N=29)
Social Scientists: 36.2% (N=47)
Humanities: 42.9% (N=28)
Either the "rational economic man" theory is wrong, or more probably, as Levitt suggests, the spinning dancer theory on left/right brains is wrong.
1 comment:
This has come in several places with disagreements about whether it has any thing to dowith left/right brains. My own suspicion is that it does. See the Wikipedia article on multistable perception; I amnot able to paste the link on this computer but the link is in my blog.
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