Comment by samueladam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samueladam | Hacker News Reader

According to this article: http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=27

This news article, like many others, ignores the true source of this optical illusion and instead claims it is a quick test to see if you use more of your right brain or left brain. This is utter nonsense, but the “right-brain/left brain” thing is in the public consciousness and won’t be going away anytime soon. Sure, we have two hemispheres that operate fine independently and have different abilities, but they are massively interconnected and work together as a seamless whole (providing you have never had surgery to cut your corpus callosum).

...

Further, how your visual cortex constructs this optical illusion says nothing about your hemispheric dominance, and is absolutely not a quick personality profile.

It actually depends on where you initially look at the image. I first focused on the torso and saw clockwise, and then focused on the extended foot and saw counter-clockwise.

Edit: Hmm, I guess it's a test of if you're a breast man or a leg man.

Reminds me of a handset project I once worked on. We had two baseband chipsets (with associated cpu) in one mobile phone. The software that sent commands between the two was called BundleOfNerves. Fun times :)

Totally nothing to do with the hemispheres - nonetheless, really frustrating that I can't seem to control which way I see her 'spinning' - that all happens behind the scenes in my head. ah!

It's not hard to flip her spin direction, just focus on the point of her toes and tell yourself that her toes are going from (left->right) or (right->left) and that'll change the way you interpret her spin.

That was a good tip. I spent the last 5 minutes making her change direction all the time. In the end I could make her switch almost every time by focussing on her down-foot for a while, just as you said, and then slowly blinking (eyes mostly closed) until I hit an animation phase that triggered the switch.

Nonetheless still interesting how hard it is to make her switch. Right now, only 30 seconds after I lost interest, I don't think I could repeat the trick without re-focussing for a few minutes first.

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