Professor David Novik from the University of Texas at El Paso (USA) is studying the effect of “illusions of the mannie-White” and regularly publishes new images to illustrate his conclusions. In the picture presented above, we see 12 round figures that seem different, at least in color, and for some and in size. But this is a purposefully created illusion – in fact, they are completely the same.
In the 1960s, psychologist Michael White discovered a curious effect in which the color of objects in the foreground changed the perception of the background picture, which they overlap. In the 1970s, the psychologist Hans Manker continued his work, who proved that the effect does not depend on a specific shade, the illusion works with any combinations of flowers. Today, Novik, inspired by their discoveries and the works of the Japanese professor Akiesi Kitaoka, explores multidimensional images to find the most spectacular and complex variations of illusions.
Two -dimensional version of the illusion
In a simplified interpretation, everything comes down to the fact that our brain perceives light from the closest object as a dominant, and spreads it to the background picture. That is, crossing out the circle of soft beige color with a bright red strip, we “turn” it into pink. In practice, everything is much more complicated, shades of lines, width and mutual location are important – Novak discovered many different combinations.
The most interesting thing is that science does not yet understand why this is happening. According to one version, the brain perceives the best brain, and therefore notices the fact of the presence of the sphere in the picture, and only then specifies what color it is. According to another version, this is due to the fact that the light falls unevenly on the retina, the signal of one color overtakes the other, and the eyes “deceive” the brain. And perhaps there is a difficult combination of these phenomena at all.
Source — Sciencealert