Dima thinks when [neurotypical] subjects see the illusion, which is somewhat ambiguous, their brains strengthen this connection such that what they expect — a normal face — becomes more influential, overpowering the actual, though unlikely, visual information. [People with s]chizophrenia , meanwhile, may be unable to modulate this pathway, accepting the concave face as reality.

Interesting.

I wonder if anyone will realize how unteneble it is to maintain that there is only one reality, arbited by NTs, and that anyone who is not experiencing that particular reality is broken somehow. In this case, NTs are actually seeing their brain function in a way that makes them perceive something incorrectly.

People should realize that brains are complicated things, and that we *all* have *perception.* All of us. We all have various factors influencing how we perceive the world. And there is no such thing as “The World” objectively, and us getting it straight unless we’re broken somehow (like having schizophrenia). Rather, we all have different, unique lenses through which we view the world, and we need to have the flexibility to take into consideration someone else’s lens and its equal validity to ours.
amandaw´s last blog ..Inertia

Thanks for an inneresting piece.

I watched it go round about twelve times, and even used the pause button to slow it down. Knowing what was coming I was able to see it as concave right until the back side was fully facing me, when it became convex, and wouldn’t go back until it was about 3/4 around. Playing with it . . . a couple of times I couldn’t do it at all, and once, just once, I was able to hold the illusion for all but a split second, again, right when the mask is facing fully away and the illusion is most complete.

Neat stuff.

Be very wary of trusting people who claim this or that about brain structure of all people, women, folks with a particular disability, etc based on fMRI of a few subjects. Because they could have been dead fish.

Just recently I saw a colourblindness test being advertised as an IQ test. This does nothing to increase my confidence about how much these tests say, especially from any online source, fun though they may be.

(I had really interesting results from an official colourblindness test some professional once had me do out of interest, since my brother is colourblind and he just wanted to see how I’d do.)

I only saw the mask hollow side as concave if I let it be, but I can switch it at will to seeing it convex if I put in a little bit of effort. If I played with it a while I’d probably be able to see all kinds of strange stuff in that too.

There is a condition called Synesthesia in which the person sees sound, smells colors etc. It is really interesting.

Synesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense (for example, hearing) is simultaneously perceived as if by one or more additional senses such as sight. Another form of synesthesia joins objects such as letters, shapes, numbers or people’s names with a sensory perception such as smell, color or flavor. The word synesthesia comes from two Greek words, syn (together) and aisthesis (perception). Therefore, synesthesia literally means “joined perception.”

Oh yeah the brain is still a giant mystery. For all we think we know about how it works and how researchers interpret fMRI and other scan data it’s still very large-scale stuff and the brain works on a very very fine scale indeed. We know some of the larger structures are related to some functions because when those structures stop working some people stop being able to do some things. But not everyone. There are clearly redundancies and workarounds and we simply do not know the how of very basic stuff like memory storage. What changes physically and/or electrochemically when we make new memories? What happens with how memories are kept to make some of them so unreliable?

We don’t know. It may be a long time before we have the technology to be able to examine a working brain on on the scale it works at in the time frames it does stuff. It would be kind of nice if neuro researchers and especially pop science writers would just be okay with that and say “We don’t know yet” instead of coming up with bullshit just-so stories that astonishingly often just happen to reinforce existing privilege structures.