Visual Optical Illusion: Did you see the Spinning Discs or Rotating Snakes? – Check Reason Here
Visual Optical Illusion: Try to test your observation skills and eyesight by looking at in this optical illusion image. Did you see the Spinning Discs or Rotating Snakes?
Spinning Discs Optical Illusions: An optical illusion is a mind-bending illustration of an object or drawing or picture that has different appearances if looked at from different perspectives. There are many types of optical illusions like physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions. These optical illusions are also a part of the field of psychoanalysis as they throw some light on your personality traits. A normal human brain can look at things or images differently forming a different perception from each angle. One such clever illustration is the Rotating snakes, an optical illusion developed by Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka in 2003.
Rotating Snakes Visual Optical Illusion
Courtesy of Akiyoshi Kitaoka
The above image was developed by Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka in 2003 as an optical illusion named rotating snakes. This illusion is a type of peripheral drift illusion where the “snakes” consist of several bands of color which resemble coiled serpents. Although the image is static, the snakes appear to be moving in circles. The speed of perceived motion depends on the frequency of microsaccadic eye movements (Alexander & Martinez-Conde, 2019). But in actuality the entire image is static.
What is Peripheral Drift Illusion?
The Peripheral Drift Illusion (PDI) refers to a motion illusion generated by the presentation of a sawtooth luminance grating in the visual periphery. In 2003, Kitaoka Akiyoshi and Ashida created a variant of the PDI which took the continuous sawtooth luminance change and reversed the intermediate greys. Kitaoka has created numerous variants of the PDI including the most popular one “rotating snakes”.
The illusion in the image can be easily seen when fixating off to the side of it and then blinking as fast as possible. It was discovered that most observers can see the illusion easily when reading text with the illusion figure in the periphery. The motion of such illusions is consistently perceived in a dark-to-light direction.
Vision Scientists have studied this image for a long and have shared their thoughts on this amazing optical Illusion:
Hermann von Helmholtz, the noted 19th-century physician, and scientist said “It is just those cases that are not in accordance with reality which is particularly instructive for discovering the laws of the processes by which normal perception originates.”
Backus and Ipek Oruc (Professors), became fascinated with the Rotating Snakes illusion. The pair conducted a series of experiments that culminated in a paper published in the Journal of Vision, which explains how basic aspects of visual perception give rise to the anomalous perception of motion.
The Journal stated “The first thing to notice about Rotating Snakes is that the motion grinds to a halt if you stare at just one part of the image. On the other hand, it keeps going if you keep looking around. So eye movements are important. However, the illusory motion is not actually caused by the motion of the image across your retina. Instead, what matters is that the image is at different positions on the retina from time to time. In fact, a briefly flashed image of Rotating Snakes appears to rotate like crazy, even if there’s no time to move your eye across the image.”
It further adds that “Notice that any given disk within the image always rotates in the same direction. Kitaoka, who created this version of the illusion, has included both clockwise and counter-clockwise rotating disks, but if you pay attention, you will notice that each disk in the image is faithful to its own direction of rotation. The illusory motion is always in the same direction as this progression of colors: black, blue, white, yellow.”
Optical illusions always give some fascinating insight into how our brains work. Specific combinations of color, light, and patterns can trick our brains into visually perceiving something that isn’t there. So tell us, did you spot the rotating snakes in this optical illusion?