Illusion: Pretty girls turn ugly by staring

Freaky but cool:

My transcript: (click the [+/-] to expand/collapse →)

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Video begins by instructing viewer to keep eyes focused on small crosshairs at center of video, with a woman’s face on each side. The two faces then start cycling rapidly. As the viewer keeps their eyes trained on the crosshair and not on the faces, the faces start seemingly distorting. Yet, whenever the viewer shifts their gaze to look at the faces, they realize the cycling faces actually look perfectly normal. The illusion resumes any time the viewer returns their gaze to the crosshairs at the middle the video.

This is apparently due to a newly discovered phenomenon called the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect”. Essentially (from what I understand of it), when you see rapidly changing images (ie. faces) but without specifically focusing on them, the differences between these faces are accentuated and amplified by the brain without having the time to resolve the images properly, resulting in grotesquely deformed images.

Cool.

(via Joe. My. God.)

Tags: illusions • optical illusions • Flashed Face Distortion Effect