Visual Mind Games

  • Posted 10.23.01
  • NOVA

Like a tiny, ever-alert judge seated inside your head, your brain is constantly making decisions about evidence brought to it by way of your senses, to give you as clear an understanding as possible of what you're seeing, feeling, tasting, etc. Sometimes you can catch your brain trying to, well, make up its mind about how to present such information. Here we offer a series of optical brainteasers culled from Phantoms in the Brain, by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee.

Launch Interactive

Challenge your brain with the well-known Necker cube and other optical brainteasers.

This feature originally appeared on the site for the NOVA program Secrets of the Mind.

Sources

Images

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With slight modifications, the graphics and captions above were excerpted with permission from Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (Quill/William Morrow, 1998).

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