The Illusion Only Some People Can See

Dude, the example with the rubix cube absolutely broke me. Even if you try to cheat and look at an edge it still tricks you. The Curiosity Show is a goldmine!

This has gotta be the most disturbing illusion I have ever seen, no matter how hard I try to beat it, it gets me every time.

The Ames Window Illusion is just so mind-boggling to me, no matter how much I tried to trick it, it always seems to me that it is oscillating.

The only time I was able to see it NOT oscillating, was toward the late middle portion of the video ( 11:58 ) , when you were showing the jumbo window spinning, shot from outside of your (real) window. I was able to follow the under/bottomside of the lower corner of the short side in a full 360° spin. If I diverted my attention to any other portion of the spinning window, it appeared to oscillate.

“My Brain prefers the illusion, rather than what’s actually happening”......if this isn’t 2020 in a nutshell lol

What's even better is when you can consciously "switch" the illusion on and off in your mind. Or essentially see both perspectives at once.

I first became aware of this illusion while in person at Six Flags in Atlanta, Georgia back in the early 70's when, after stepping into a "Room", the perceived perception of depths & distance conflicted with my natural understanding of the world. I was maybe 11 years old back then and the illusion imprinted on me. Thes explanation from this video helped explain the perception.

For some reason (possibly just memories from the first time I ever saw it), I always see the skull in the painting as a skull, just warped like it was skewed in Photoshop. Honestly, just impresses me that Holbein was able to do that with paint.

Ruler: Seamlessly slides through matter, which is impossible My Brain: I'm ok with this

I'm screaming at my brain: "STOP SEEING THE ILLUSION!!!" But I can't stop seeing it!

Finally, at 11:50 I was able to watch it rotate again. It is all about lighting.

When I first watched it. The very beginning, I was able to watch it rotate 100%. The second I heard the host say it was an illusion and oscillates, then I couldn't go back. Kinda frustrating now lol

I love how this guy tricks us into gaining knowledge.

Me after re-watching the video 5 times and finally seeing it rotate “Finally, inner peace”

I wanted to search for "Ames Window Illusion" when I heard Alan Watts talking about it in one of his lectures. The description didn't prepare me. It's really quite remarkable, particularly with Derek hanging halfway out of it.

With the big window, I actually perceive it as continuing to rotate up until the moment it's edge-on. After that, my perception flips, and I see it coming "back" from an oscillation that I never saw in the first place.

When you attached the rubik's cube to the thing, you thought it'll be less confusing. But it actually got worse.

"Approach the world with a little more humility and a little less certainty!" - Ve 42.0

it initially looks like it stops for me, but once I fully understood what was happening with the Rubik's cube it (somewhat) broke the illusion for me as my brain adjusted to what I was actually looking at. Also, interestingly, the Ames room illusion has always been really fickle for me, I only seem to actually get it about a third of the time or so. The way someone once explained it to me, the reason these types of illusions ultimately work usually has to do with the fact that we actually only have 2D vision, not 3D vision (if we had the latter, we'd be able to see every surface of every object from all angles simultaneously, which is obviously so different from how our vision actually works that it's not even really possible to imagine it accurately, but this is how a hypothetical 4D being would presumably see the world), but our brains are really good at combining 2D images from our retinas together to allow us to perceive depth (from a single directional vantage point, at least) and distance in 3D space. Our brains are so good at it, in fact, that they'll even do it with actual entirely 2D images like paintings, photos, etc. not to mention moving sequences of 2D images like films or animation. However, this means that our brain can also be somewhat easily "tricked" into perceiving illusionary depth in other situations where it seems to directly contradict other visual information we are receiving (because really, all depth perception is kind of an illusion for us in some sense), like when an object appears to move in a way which doesn't square with the way our brain wants to fit it into 3D space (which is sort of what's going on here). The reason it varies somewhat is because different people's brains are essentially trained to intuit somewhat differently shaped 3D spaces (like the interior of a rectilinear building versus a rounded building, for instance) depending on what they get used to during the very early formative years of childhood when we're all first learning to understand this space which we can only directly perceive a little over 2 dimensions of at most. But even with these differences accounted for, no one can actually see in 3D, it's just not possible with the physics of how light moves through three spatial dimensions, and the physiology of how our eyes are able to obtain sensory information from visible light. Obviously, this last part is pretty much me restating what the video already says, but yeah, our limitations due to 2D vision are usually what's ultimately to blame for oddities like this.

One of my favourite illusions. I love how the shorter end tricks the brain and mind into perceiving back/forth; when my eyes clearly see the short end coming towards me/the screen. I find following the short side allows me to perceive the rotation and break the illusion. Also, my method works even better for me being tired af, so my noodle isn't opperating as properly as it should and allows my eyes to be able to catch the spinning, exnaying the back/forth completely.