Links for 2011-07-12

  • Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive. We called it the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect" and wanted to share it with the world, so we put it on YouTube.
Tags

More like this

Beauty can be everlasting, ephemeral {internet sensations} and above all else, in the eye of the beholder. Poets and artists have explored this mystery for centuries, but can science reveal new insights? Ed Yong at DiscoverBlogs recently wrote about a fascinating brain imaging study done that…
Swans on Tea » I'm Not Willing to Believe You "I'm perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one's thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that's not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation -- you can't just write off the experience…
I was reminded of this illusion by the Seed Daily Zeitgeist yesterday. In order to get the full effect, I'll show you one set of photos here, and the rest of the post will be below the fold. The first are from Schwanginer et al. (2003)1: They look pretty normal, right? Now look at these: Gross,…
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science As someone who blogs about science and occasionally about politics, I am contractually obligated to link to this article. Fortunately, it's also good and interesting. (tags: psychology science politics neuroscience climate vaccine culture society cog-…