Remember those amusing (and slightly maddening) optical illusions that made their rounds on social media and stirred up debates? Among the most popular was about the color of a certain dress. Some insist the dress is white and gold, while some argue that it’s clearly blue and black.
How about the photo showing a pair of gleaming legs at first glance but actually just have white marks drawn on them?
There have been numerous mind-boggling images that have proven both funny and divisive, and one Twitter user decided to contribute to the list with his own optical illusion. Nayem (@nxyxm) posted a photo of what looked like an early evening beach setting. You can clearly see small waves crawling towards the shore, and rocks and sand all underneath a speckled gray sky. Or at least, that’s what you think you’re seeing.
Under the tweet, which has since garnered over two thousand retweets and more than five thousand likes, user @nxyxm explained what the image really shows.
Because the user offered a clear explanation of what was really going on in the photo, users replied with their own interpretations of what they saw at first glance. Some brought up the black and gold dress optical illusion, while some eagerly asked for permission to repost the image. Then there were others who claimed to have seen both a nature setting and a car door.
Come to think of it, it’s quite a let down. After seeing something you assume to be romantic, brooding, and captivating, the last thing you’d want to hear is that the image you admired initially ended up being a boring close up of a car door with a damaged seal panel.
It’s the kind of post you can’t just scroll past and ignore. How he associated the wrong interpretation with creativity and being an artist was definitely a good way to go about correction. Artists who replied to his tweet confirmed that they did indeed see nature.
Wonderopolis offers a straightforward definition to help us understand what optical illusions are: “Optical illusions are images or pictures that we perceive differently than they really are. Put another way, optical illusions occur when our eyes send information to our brains that tricks us into perceiving something that does not match reality.”
Optical illusions are either physiological, cognitive, or ambiguous. Ambiguous illusions are more common as these are objects or images that can be seen and interpreted in more than one way. A single tweet that gets thousands of people thinking and wondering shows how we see things from different perspectives. Optical illusions prove just how amazing the human brain is. Patterns, color, and light are used to create images but it is our perception that misleads us and trick us into thinking we are seeing something else entirely.
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