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Via Liveleak. “Maximize the screen and focus on the cross; some people will see monsters.”
It’s an accidental discovery called the “Flashed face distortion effect” but no-one seems to know how or why it happens at a psychological or physiological level.
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an unattractive woman is viewed as a monster I only see very few monsters and mainly women’s faces that reflect the variety of faces across the human spectrum.
“OTP – Occupy The Patriarchy” ~ me
Evidently multitasking doesn’t work very well when the task involves the senses.
It’s also tough to listen to two conversations at the same time, without getting them mixed up.
I think the explanation is that we don’t normally focus our attention on two things simultaneously; we alternate, at least when the stimulus is visual or auditory.
Taste and smell, on the other hand, seems to be experienced in toto and it’s often difficulty to isolate one aspect unless it’s overwhelmingly strong.
It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.
I love playing the “brain shifting” games offered by Lumosity. I also play online scrabble games (Wordfeud) in Dutch and English. Apparently, this also keeps the neurons healthy.
“OTP – The Patriarchy” ~ me
adrena, I see a lot of faces that are wildly distorted: bulging heads, un-natural colors, cyclops-eyed, and a whole lot else that’s only marginally descibable as humanoid. I did say up front the effect varies for people. Sometime a cigar is just a cigar, not a patriarchal phallic perjorative aimed at you personally and women everywhere.
The McGurk effect:
Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart. ~ Phil Jackson
…something to do with how facial recognition is processed by the brain. If one subscribes to the swiss army school of brain functioning (good book some years back called The Prehistory of the Mind), it’s pretty reasonable to embrace the notion that facial recognition is a pretty fundamental brain tool. Evolutionarily, good facial recognition would have been very important – a basic skill for the socialized strategy that we’ve practiced for yonks.
If I had to guess, I would expect that this phenomenon has to do with facial geometries – where facial features are located in relation to each other appears to play a key role in recognition (I recall a piece that someone did taking Gore’s facial elements and Clinton’s facial geography and superimposing them and it was clearly recognizable as Clinton). I would guess that this duplex presentation triggers mass error in that processing, likely exploiting how binocular vision functions in the near field.
’round our household the joke is that the body was put together by the lowest bidder – sometime evolution is elegant, sometimes it’s an ugly, just good enough kludge.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
There must be something with the flashing, quick images as well. Like as soon as your brain starts to get a handle on the facial features in the visual periphery, the image changes and your brain has to “interpolate” the differences (still thinking it is the same face.) Before it can complete even that, the face shifts again, adding even more confusion. If I looked away from the cross and at a face for a second, then back to the cross, it took a few faces before the distortion effect “ramped up” again. Seems like a cumulative effect.
with recognizing and interpreting the expressions of human faces. Even compared to apes, we do this a lot more and have evolved to be incredibly sensitive to facial cues. Only dogs seem to be even in the same ballpark of human facial recognition, we bred it into them to make better companions. Wolves, coyotes, even cats don’t look at our faces like dogs do, nothing in the animal world does. That’s why cats seem so aloof compared to dogs, to them looking at your face is as interesting as looking at say someone’s foot. It’s not that they don’t like you, your face and expressions are just not that special to them.
How patriarchal is that? Just kidding!
Thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow
“OTP – Occupy The Patriarchy” ~ me
Most animals consider that a hostile act, no?
“OTP – Occupy The Patriarchy” ~ me
and for some animals, staring may imply dominance. The Alpha dog or wolf stares, the others look away.
Some cultures dislike wide smiles: a display of teeth = baring of fangs.
Facial recognition involves an unusually large part of an infant’s developing brain and is one on the earliest things learned.
We continue to devote a lot of attention to it all our lives, which implies it has strong survival value – friend or foe?
I suspect if the sequence did not juxtapose such radically different facial features, the effect would be less. If you watch a single face morph a little at at time, you don’t get that effect. If you morphed a single picture but with more extreme changes, I wonder if the effect would occur.
It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.
There’s a small area of the brain that plays a role in one’s ability to recognize faces. (Google: prosopagnosia brain area.) When that area is damaged, a person is more likely to have trouble recognizing particular faces, and she may sometimes even be unable to recognize whether something is or is not a face.
Maybe the little processor in there is not designed to receive two sets of inputs simultaneously, so components of the images get mixed, blended, etc.