To solve this puzzle, you have to know yourself inside-out and outside-in

it looks different than it feels

  • Her friends think Mimi is a great catch; she is beautiful, affectionate, and very smart. Sadly, she is better at attracting intimacy than keeping it. Her previous lovers claim they were driven away by her jealous rages. Mimi claims that her anger was an appropriate reaction to the inconsiderate actions of her boyfriends, for example, “catching him staring at other women.” Mimi’s problem looks different to her friends than it feels to Mimi.  She’s right to say that they don’t understand; after all, they don’t have access to what she sees and how she interprets it. But Mimi doesn’t understand her puzzle either; from her first-person perspective she can’t see that her interpretations are distorted. [From their third-person perspectives, her friends can see that at least some of her boyfriends were good guys who were not interested in other women.]  To conceptualize and ultimately solve her puzzle, she has to understand it from the inside [how it feels] and from the outside [how it looks].
  • Most people see Mr. E as a gifted problem-solver. He shares that opinion and attributes his many successes to his “smarts” (his ability to figure out how to get to the outcomes he wants). While he may look successful, he doesn’t feel that way. He sees himself as a failure because he can’t deliver on his sincere promise to never gamble again. In contrast to his ability to predict and control the course of events in the external world, he seems unable to control himself. Socrates has a recommendation for Mr. E and anyone else who can’t seem to control themself: “Know Yourself!”

Optical illusions give you the chance to observe how you create subjective reality [in this case, images] from objective reality [pixels on the screen].  Use the graphics below as probes to evoke subjective phenomena that you can observe from the perspective of a researcher of visual perception as well as from the perspective of a creature who is trying to make sense of what it is looking at.  The first graphic, for example, can be interpreted as a pretty girl or as birds tending a nest.  Your task is to study what happens at the moment your interpretation changes from one to the other.   As the subject, pay attention to how the image emerges in consciousness from the array of pixels [you can change your interpretation intentionally or let it happen on its own].  As the researcher, note that the array of pixels does not have an intrinsic meaning; the subject creates meaning by interpreting the pixels first one way and then another.  Each graphic provides an opportunity to explore visual phenomena from both the outside [researcher’s perspective] and the inside [subject’s perspective]. 

 – Select a graphic for more  – 

Ambiguous Figure
ambiguous figure
Neker cube
Necker Cube
ambiguous figure
how fast can you flip?
ambiguous figure
9 Embedded Figures
Figure Ground
Who’s bigger?
Identical Figures
our logo
Impossible Figure