The Latest Optical Illusion Will Make You See Things That Aren’t There
These sort of fun illustrations are all over the internet. Frustrating as they are, the best ones are those that put up a little fight. Some optical illusions will have you pulling at your hair trying to figure them out. Like this one: how many legs does the elephant in this drawing have?
Seems like an easy task. The puzzle’s right in front of you, so just look at it and find the answer, right? Of course, it’s never that easy! But when you finally figure it out, the victory is so sweet.
My personal favorite type of visual puzzle isn’t drawings, however, but photographs. That’s because you’d think a photograph is just an image of what’s “really there.” If the image hasn’t been photoshopped, you know the illusion is created by something that’s naturally there in the picture, plain as day.
Case in point: take the photograph of this girl’s leggings that have been making their rounds on the internet. Looking at the photo, you’d swear that the girl has two extremely skinny legs. The photo hasn’t been messed with in any way! Can you figure out what’s going on?
When you can’t solve a photo illusion, it’s even more fun/frustrating! So check out this one, that comes from Reddit user djeclipz. It appears to show two photos of the same street, side by side.
Djeclipz swears the images are exactly the same, and haven’t been changed at all. But when you look at the two side by side, something definitely seems off. Surely, one of the images must be stretched or cropped, right?
BuzzFeed writer Crystal Ro even when so far as to open the images in photo editing software and slide them on top of each other. Sure enough, the images matched perfectly — they’re exactly the same!
Looking at the images, however, I find that really hard to believe! If you trust your eyes, the images have to be different! Does that mean we can’t trust our eyes?!
It turns out there is a “scientific” explanation for what’s going on here. That has to do with the way our brains process what’s going on in the images when they’re set alongside each other. Our poor brains just get a little…confused!
So can you figure out what’s creating the optical illusion and making these identical images appear different when set side by side? Give the puzzle a shot, and let us know what you think!
