That was a little freaky, in that things so simple could have such immense perceptual effects. I was on a project to create one of the first digital video cameras capable of 100,000 fps, and a key problem was to identify just how "bad" the video could get, and in what ways, while the observer would still perceive it as good. This took me down the rabbit hold of color science, and how human eyes perceive color. The net result was that we were able to tweak the color filter dyes on the sensor to let substantially more light through, yet "fix" it as a post processing step in ways the eye couldn't detect (but software could easily measure). Some like to say "numbers don't lie". But when they do lie in just the right way, our eyes tell us: "Looks good to me!"
Your comment makes me think of this video I saw recently of a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark made entirely with Commodore 64 character graphics.* If you pause the video at any particular time it looks like jumbled garbage, but when it's playing it looks amazingly silky smooth: ruclips.net/video/nnYmt6_90NU/видео.html * It is not really running on a Commodore 64 (it was created on a PC using specialized tools) but it does actually use the built in character set (PETSCII) and display limitations (40 x 25) so it conceivably could be played back on a real Commodore 64.
@Steve Mould As a thought after the alien faces demo, I tried watching the rest of the video by looking just off to the right of your face, and I found myself experiencing a more mild version of the same illusion.When you turned your head from slightly sideways to straight on at the camera, your eyes and head would expand as if to compensate for the growing distance between your eyes, and your pupils were easy to tell which direction they were pointed. When you would make an expressive eye or mouth gesture, those parts would grow/shrink or move around more drastically than when I rewatched the few seconds again looking directly on, maybe as my brain was showing me how your emotions were changing. Perhaps this is some sort of evolutionary social advantage to being able to more easily pick up on when someone out of view changes their emotion towards you as if to warn or update you on your relative social position/change within others' minds. And it could be this way towards the periphery because - besides the fact that middle vision is more detailed - you would want to more easily pick up on general expression changes of onlookers staring at you, making you more quickly aware if you were doing something taboo when you were unknowing of the circumstances of your action prior to make emotional expression look more dramatic.
I also experienced the same thing. Never being previously aware of this effect, I've never really noticed it at all, but after being aware of the effect, I started seeing it more. One moment in particular was closer to the end of the video when it cuts and Steve's hair has shifted quite a bit. His hair was in my periphery, and I noticed it morph drastically. I like your theory as well, as that provides a reason as to why we would benefit from such a thing and evolve to have it. My initial thought was just that maybe when the face changes, all of the detail we have to go off of is in whatever we saw initially, so our brains are only capable of building off of that information and morphing the image, rather than refreshing the image entirely. Hpwever, because the changes are so exaggerated, it does seem like it serves a purpose in some way. Even colors were greatly exaggerated, which leads me to believe that you are completely right about it being a tool for reading people's reactions. Our faces change in color depending on our emotions, but to the naked eye it can be very subtle, especially when in your peripheral vision, it would make sense then that we would benefit from changes to the color or expressions on someone's face being exaggerated in our mind so that we can pick up on them more easily.
Same here. His eyes got all huge like anime eyes, and the expressions were SUPER exaggerated. And it was like the nose was being squished from all sides to give room to the enlarged mouth and eyes.
Interesting subject. I have two things to add to this. When I was a kid I used to see faces everywhere. Cars, trains, rocks, anything had a face. I'm not sure if that's unusual in any way or other children experienced the same. The second thing is an experiment with true mirror. Yes, I spent 300 or 400 euros and bought a true mirror (they are expensive because they are not manufactured in big quantities, sucks), mirror that doesn't swap left and right side. This means that when I look in the true mirror, I see myself as others see me. It's a weird experience and very big majority of people dislike their image in true mirror. The reason why they dislike it is because they are used to the image they see in a normal mirror. Because 99% of all faces are NOT symmetrical, once we see ourselves in the true mirror we see all the differences from the "normal mirror image" intensified and as such they appear more grotesque. Example... let's say that your left eye is 2 millimeters closer to nose line. You get used to seeing that every day so when you see for the first time a mirror image where the difference is on the other side, it gets multiplied - you see it being 4 mm instead of just 2.
Ummm.... have you tried taking a picture of yourself. A better method - video call yourself ( use two devices ) , record yourself through the back camera of the first device and look through the second device. Its free if you happen to have two devices. (Just borrow someone elses if you dont)
You can actually test your theory of the fusiform face area being the main cause of the flash face disturtion effect. There are people that have a disorder that is called Prosopagnosia, which makes them unable to recognize faces due to some form of damage that was done to the fusiform face area in the brain. Therefore, if your theory is correct, they shouldn't see the effect in action, and just see pictures of people flashing in the corner of their eyes. But if they do experience this effect, then the main culprit would be the neural adaptation, or something else entirely. I might be overlooking something here, but this sounds like a pretty effective way of testing your theory out. These sort of people aren't THAT rare either, according to wikipedia, up to 2.5% people in the US experience it to some degree, so gathering a handful of people that are willing to look at this video shouldn't be impossible either.
6 лет назад+11
I do have a mild form of face-blindness (prosopagnosia) and I clearly see the alien effect. Worth trying with someone who has some high-level prosopagnosia.
It should also be tested with a variety of non-face images and shapes. Because while I can believe that the facial recognition part of your brain is misfiring, it could also be whatever part of your brain tries to fill in your peripheral vision with more data than you actually see. Actually, it could be that the illusion occurs because your facial recognition hardware isn't firing at all and that's just what faces look like when you don't know they're faces (because they're in your peripheral ). edit: If you go to just before the first faces ( 0:25 ), and stare at the center of the screen, you get at least a partial effect when the faces popup. It's not as strong though.
I was just thinking this! I have prosopagnosia and can't recognise friends and family, (or even myself), if they change their appearance slightly e.g. by getting a haircut, plus I hardly ever see faces in objects (pareidolia). The Thatcher effect doesn't work on me: I believe I'm not very good at understanding faces holistically but can pick out the details -- even though I can't recognise faces, I can draw them relatively accurately from scratch, so that other people can recognise who I've drawn. All that said, I *can* see the alien effect. Sure, the plural of anecdote is not data, but it'd be interesting to see how others with prosopagnosia experience this effect.
even though our data set only has two people atm, this kind of result is facinating for me! I love it when my first assumption gets challenged/debunked so quickly, it gets your gears running far more than hearing "yea that was pretty good first assumption"
he really undersold this one. I literally saw one guy who had just flat skin on his entire face down to his mouth, but instead of his mouth that's where his eyes were. another guy just had a big mouth in the middle of his face, but he looked pretty chill with that
Ok, how about this for an alternate explanation. It's a bit like the first of the two explanations given, but not quite... Because you're not looking directly at the faces, your facial recognition algorithm is getting less detailed information about the faces, as it has to rely on peripheral vision. So to do it's job it's taking what gross measurements it can, in other words only the distances between facial features. When the face changes, it refuses to believe that is possible, so instead assumes the new features are in the same position to the old features and to maintain this has to distort (stretch or compress) what little information it has between the features.
This seems closest to the real explanation. Peripheral vision is surprisingly "low-res", so the world in the periphery is continuously modeled or recreated by the brain based on previous knowledge to make up for that lack of detail.
My gut feeling is you're on the right lines. A lot of hallucinations happen out of the peripheral vision and I certainly couldn't make out much detail from what I saw here other than them being deformed faces. I think it's a case of the mind filling in the blanks. I'd imagine we'll be able to fully explain this illusion if someone was able to make a program which could simulate what we saw by playing around with feature recognition and the rate at which the data from different parts updates.
Yep, shot straight back to a mushroom trip I had almost 2 decades ago... remarkably vivid flashback. Didn't know those memories were still rattling around in there.
What about if you flashed many faces of the thatcher illusion? and would there be a difference between thatcher faces being flashed and just upside down faces?
If I understand correctly, you're talking about when the whole face is just upside down, and when it's been doctored so the eyes and lips alone are still the right way up as in the vid. I wonder what the difference in recognition rate would be. And if it's higher in the latter case, what would that demonstrate?
If you pause the video during the flashed face illusion, the effect continues so long as you keep staring at the cross. It's interesting that it doesn't go away over time.
I noticed the motion after effect years ago - when I was young. After riding on my bike (continuously) for a rather long time and then stopping on the side of the road, my surroundings (especially the road) seemed to move away from me.
Didn't look at my hand. Had to back it up to make sure the pipes and whatnot in Steve's room were not actually wandering around in the video, just to make it more pronounced. (They were not.) Way freaky.
Interesing - I play most RUclips videos at double speed, to save time, and I found that the Faces Effect didn't come into play until I set the RUclips speed back to normal speed - perhaps that suggests something about the time it takes for a face to get 'embedded'/seen as the normal by the human brain? If others want to see whether they still see the effect or not viewing the video at double speed, it could be useful for data's sake, or if I'm just an abberation.
I still got the effect at 2x speed, but it appeared less pronounced. It appears to support the theory of having the first image embedded in your mind before the image is replaced by another. If the pictures hang around for longer, it gives your brain more time to focus on each image before it changes.
The most bizzare part of the thatcher illusion in my opinion is how she is looking at you when it's upside down but when you flip it appears as if she is staring down. I don't get how that part works.
You just helped me understand something that happens to me a LOT playing Rocket League. Sometimes I watch YT'ers or Streamers whose camera settings are way further away than what I normally use. Then when I go back into the game myself I feel like the ball is way bigger for me than it was for them. Like the ball itself changed sizes, not the camera distance that became closer... That's probably just my brain being used to the far away, smaller ball, being like "Woah this one is HUGE compared to the other one." Mind Blown.
When you introduced the upside down face with the flipped eyes and mouth, I *instantly* realized the eyes were upside down, but it wasn't until you flipped it that I saw the mouth was too. Weird how that happens.
That was absolutely mad. I looked at the faces as soon as I saw something strange and realised the difference when looking at the cross versus at the images. Such fun.
Woooooah that movement thing is trippy. Played it like five or six times just to stare at a random part of the room. Weirdly enough, it seems that everything is distorted initially, but it quickly starts to morph back to what it's supposed to look like. Makes me think about how distorted my vision is normally...
I had a very vivid experience of neural adaptation once when I was playing a platformer game set in a circular world. After spending quite a long time looking at a scene with a floor that curved slightly downwards, when I looked back at the real world, for a couple of minutes all horizontal lines appeared to be curved upwards.
Kees Reuzelaar Well doing this for 10 minutes can't be a normal thing for a brain to process so I don't think I need to but thank you. It was also a pretty short one.
Woah that hand thing was pretty scary. It took a few moments to wear off. I already thought now my brain is broken and everything will be moving weirdly back and forth in my view.
Steve Mould Around 03:47 in the above video, your image in the portrait frame looks quite like our friend Patrick McGoohan. I wouldn't mind seeing a side by side comparison. Your videos are alway interesting. Keep on keeping on.
4:00 "The facial recognition network has been trained for millions of years of evolution" It also is trained as you get older. Babies can't really see faces.
Try taking two pictures at different highs at the same time (like a stereo photo but up and down rather then left and right) then put the pictures to left and right and look at them as a stereo image. It is really creepy and cool.
Civilized man has lost the ability to spot aliens posing as humans. By concentrating on the cross, we free up the subconscious mind and it's able to recognize alien faces again.
If you watch this on your phone or tablet, pause the video and skip to 2:25 Now keep your phone horizontally level and turn the phone/tablet back and forth between the image being upside down or right side up. It looks like the eyes are following you.
So fascinating thing I tested out. In case anyone contested that the rotated images changed during rotation (not me, but say, someone else), I paused Margaret Thatcher's image and rotated it myself. It was the same effect as this video demonstrated. (BTW, I did it on the horizontal plane or RUclips reorients the video on my fon :P ) What I discovered was that the upside down "rightness" of the image not only fails at 180 degree rotation (right side up), but also at 90 and 270 degrees (sideways). I took it further and tried to see exactly where the "rightness" failed, and it was anything more than 45 degrees (diagonally) away from the upside down (mega gorgon). Anyone else? Anyone care? :D. I found it fascinating. Love that u inspire me to do science, Mr. Mould. Thanks for the vid!
I hate how a truly interesting video like this only gets 80,000 views after almost one year whereas a clickbaity title with nothing interesting gets millions of views.
Curios to know if the distortions are seen by everyone the same way, or if each of us has a slightly different experience regarding the distorted attributes.
There's a sort of a reverse Thatcher effect also: have your friend lie down, with the lower part of their face (everything below the eyes) obscured with a piece of paper or something. You then make eye contact with them from above their head so that their face is upside down in your field of view. After a while, your brains starts to think you are face to face with someone without a nose or a mouth, but with a bushy beard (assuming they have hair). (Discovered this with friends back when we were kids, don't know if has a designated name.)
I did notice eyes being upside down at the first image sooner than you spoke about it :) Maybe it is because I tend to look at the eyes most of the time.
wow, the first experiemt was super weird. Not only did the proportions look cartoonish (except for Micheal for some reason xD), but some of the faces had even facial features missing. Like the nose or even the whole face just got blank, like someone just photoshoped it out and it was just skin. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. But when I looked at it it was there. So weird. btw. really love your videos. c:
7:00 my hand didn't shrink/change size, but: the contents of my stomach wanted to be free; my eyes couldn't stop blinking and excreting moist; I became lightheaded; this was bad for my vision full-stop
Yet another great video. I looked at my hand and it was really freaky. I was reminded of pulling on the legs of your trousers outwards for an amount of time, and then when you stop pulling on the trousers your arms seem to rise up from the sides.
If the first hypothesis for the flashed face distortion effect is true, then changing the order of the faces should potentially produce a different illusion: someone's features would be relative to the previous face, so for instance, someone's eyes should appear too small or too big depending on the face flashed before. I don't think that's what's happening, but I suppose it could be tested with relative ease.
Maybe it’s because there is a spatial mapping that “normalizes” the face. It would move all the parts in, out, up down etc as needed so that they were in the right places for some other part of the brain to read the expression or do some other further processing. Think of the mapping like a funhouse mirror perfectly designed to make your face look average in proportion. This mapping would need to be recalibrated for each face. The calibration is normally automatic, but something about the presentation of the illusion breaks it. When a face is viewed with the wrong mapping in place, it actually makes the face appear distorted, in the same manner as one of those perfect funhouse mirrors, but applied to the wrong face. Instead of normalizing the face, it shifts everything the wrong way and distorts it.
When you stare at something without blinking for an extended amount of time in a poorly lit room (a lot of things there) you start seeing distorted things too. Maybe that exaggerates this effect since you are staring at a stationary point and the fact that the faces change in a quickish manner might make you are less likely to blink.
This is quite late after this video was posted but, I could get my brain to produce the alien faces elusion while you are talking by looking at the bolts of the eye beam behind you.
The distortions seem to have a grain of truth. When I looked straight at the faces, I noticed that the distortions were in fact an exageration of facial features as well as expressions.
In order to test the second hypothesis, you could examine reactions to “average” feature sizes. A more likely hypothesis, though, is that feature perception has to do with the “normal” eye-tracking during initial (and successive) impression creation (meeting someone and/or analyzing emotion)...when the brain tries to analyze without relying upon the eyes’ ability to move, perceptions of first-priority features are enhanced by the brain (making them appear larger).
“... and some of my personal favorites”
*use picture of himself*
I see you!
Insert Obama giving himself an award
That was a little freaky, in that things so simple could have such immense perceptual effects.
I was on a project to create one of the first digital video cameras capable of 100,000 fps, and a key problem was to identify just how "bad" the video could get, and in what ways, while the observer would still perceive it as good. This took me down the rabbit hold of color science, and how human eyes perceive color. The net result was that we were able to tweak the color filter dyes on the sensor to let substantially more light through, yet "fix" it as a post processing step in ways the eye couldn't detect (but software could easily measure).
Some like to say "numbers don't lie". But when they do lie in just the right way, our eyes tell us: "Looks good to me!"
Programming is basically a computer lying to us but not knowing it, yet what we see is the truth. Illuminati confirmed.
Your comment makes me think of this video I saw recently of a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark made entirely with Commodore 64 character graphics.* If you pause the video at any particular time it looks like jumbled garbage, but when it's playing it looks amazingly silky smooth: ruclips.net/video/nnYmt6_90NU/видео.html
* It is not really running on a Commodore 64 (it was created on a PC using specialized tools) but it does actually use the built in character set (PETSCII) and display limitations (40 x 25) so it conceivably could be played back on a real Commodore 64.
Did you work on the phantom flex
that was actually kind of terrifying. some of them looked so distorted it was almost gorey
Terrifying what the human brain is capable of
@Steve Mould
As a thought after the alien faces demo, I tried watching the rest of the video by looking just off to the right of your face, and I found myself experiencing a more mild version of the same illusion.When you turned your head from slightly sideways to straight on at the camera, your eyes and head would expand as if to compensate for the growing distance between your eyes, and your pupils were easy to tell which direction they were pointed. When you would make an expressive eye or mouth gesture, those parts would grow/shrink or move around more drastically than when I rewatched the few seconds again looking directly on, maybe as my brain was showing me how your emotions were changing.
Perhaps this is some sort of evolutionary social advantage to being able to more easily pick up on when someone out of view changes their emotion towards you as if to warn or update you on your relative social position/change within others' minds. And it could be this way towards the periphery because - besides the fact that middle vision is more detailed - you would want to more easily pick up on general expression changes of onlookers staring at you, making you more quickly aware if you were doing something taboo when you were unknowing of the circumstances of your action prior to make emotional expression look more dramatic.
Aye, was looking for this comment.
I also experienced the same thing. Never being previously aware of this effect, I've never really noticed it at all, but after being aware of the effect, I started seeing it more. One moment in particular was closer to the end of the video when it cuts and Steve's hair has shifted quite a bit. His hair was in my periphery, and I noticed it morph drastically. I like your theory as well, as that provides a reason as to why we would benefit from such a thing and evolve to have it. My initial thought was just that maybe when the face changes, all of the detail we have to go off of is in whatever we saw initially, so our brains are only capable of building off of that information and morphing the image, rather than refreshing the image entirely. Hpwever, because the changes are so exaggerated, it does seem like it serves a purpose in some way. Even colors were greatly exaggerated, which leads me to believe that you are completely right about it being a tool for reading people's reactions. Our faces change in color depending on our emotions, but to the naked eye it can be very subtle, especially when in your peripheral vision, it would make sense then that we would benefit from changes to the color or expressions on someone's face being exaggerated in our mind so that we can pick up on them more easily.
Same here. His eyes got all huge like anime eyes, and the expressions were SUPER exaggerated. And it was like the nose was being squished from all sides to give room to the enlarged mouth and eyes.
It works, indeed. I experienced the same distorsions with LSD and mushrooms.
For me he just started to look like Voldemort.
Interesting subject. I have two things to add to this.
When I was a kid I used to see faces everywhere. Cars, trains, rocks, anything had a face. I'm not sure if that's unusual in any way or other children experienced the same.
The second thing is an experiment with true mirror. Yes, I spent 300 or 400 euros and bought a true mirror (they are expensive because they are not manufactured in big quantities, sucks), mirror that doesn't swap left and right side. This means that when I look in the true mirror, I see myself as others see me. It's a weird experience and very big majority of people dislike their image in true mirror. The reason why they dislike it is because they are used to the image they see in a normal mirror. Because 99% of all faces are NOT symmetrical, once we see ourselves in the true mirror we see all the differences from the "normal mirror image" intensified and as such they appear more grotesque. Example... let's say that your left eye is 2 millimeters closer to nose line. You get used to seeing that every day so when you see for the first time a mirror image where the difference is on the other side, it gets multiplied - you see it being 4 mm instead of just 2.
trdi And now I need to look up "true mirror".
Ummm.... have you tried taking a picture of yourself. A better method - video call yourself ( use two devices ) , record yourself through the back camera of the first device and look through the second device. Its free if you happen to have two devices. (Just borrow someone elses if you dont)
@@prasunadhikari6054 Just use your phone's camera or a webcam! There are apps that allow you to "unmirror" the image if it's mirrored.
Paredolia
@@bowlsallbroken pareidolia
You can actually test your theory of the fusiform face area being the main cause of the flash face disturtion effect.
There are people that have a disorder that is called Prosopagnosia, which makes them unable to recognize faces due to some form of damage that was done to the fusiform face area in the brain. Therefore, if your theory is correct, they shouldn't see the effect in action, and just see pictures of people flashing in the corner of their eyes.
But if they do experience this effect, then the main culprit would be the neural adaptation, or something else entirely.
I might be overlooking something here, but this sounds like a pretty effective way of testing your theory out.
These sort of people aren't THAT rare either, according to wikipedia, up to 2.5% people in the US experience it to some degree, so gathering a handful of people that are willing to look at this video shouldn't be impossible either.
I do have a mild form of face-blindness (prosopagnosia) and I clearly see the alien effect. Worth trying with someone who has some high-level prosopagnosia.
Wasn't expecting an answer so soon!
That's some interesting insight, thank you :D
It should also be tested with a variety of non-face images and shapes. Because while I can believe that the facial recognition part of your brain is misfiring, it could also be whatever part of your brain tries to fill in your peripheral vision with more data than you actually see.
Actually, it could be that the illusion occurs because your facial recognition hardware isn't firing at all and that's just what faces look like when you don't know they're faces (because they're in your peripheral ).
edit: If you go to just before the first faces ( 0:25 ), and stare at the center of the screen, you get at least a partial effect when the faces popup. It's not as strong though.
I was just thinking this! I have prosopagnosia and can't recognise friends and family, (or even myself), if they change their appearance slightly e.g. by getting a haircut, plus I hardly ever see faces in objects (pareidolia). The Thatcher effect doesn't work on me: I believe I'm not very good at understanding faces holistically but can pick out the details -- even though I can't recognise faces, I can draw them relatively accurately from scratch, so that other people can recognise who I've drawn. All that said, I *can* see the alien effect. Sure, the plural of anecdote is not data, but it'd be interesting to see how others with prosopagnosia experience this effect.
even though our data set only has two people atm, this kind of result is facinating for me! I love it when my first assumption gets challenged/debunked so quickly, it gets your gears running far more than hearing "yea that was pretty good first assumption"
he really undersold this one.
I literally saw one guy who had just flat skin on his entire face down to his mouth, but instead of his mouth that's where his eyes were. another guy just had a big mouth in the middle of his face, but he looked pretty chill with that
3:05 "Looks normal upside down, but when you flip it, it looks more realistic."
Ok, how about this for an alternate explanation. It's a bit like the first of the two explanations given, but not quite... Because you're not looking directly at the faces, your facial recognition algorithm is getting less detailed information about the faces, as it has to rely on peripheral vision. So to do it's job it's taking what gross measurements it can, in other words only the distances between facial features. When the face changes, it refuses to believe that is possible, so instead assumes the new features are in the same position to the old features and to maintain this has to distort (stretch or compress) what little information it has between the features.
This seems closest to the real explanation. Peripheral vision is surprisingly "low-res", so the world in the periphery is continuously modeled or recreated by the brain based on previous knowledge to make up for that lack of detail.
My gut feeling is you're on the right lines. A lot of hallucinations happen out of the peripheral vision and I certainly couldn't make out much detail from what I saw here other than them being deformed faces.
I think it's a case of the mind filling in the blanks. I'd imagine we'll be able to fully explain this illusion if someone was able to make a program which could simulate what we saw by playing around with feature recognition and the rate at which the data from different parts updates.
This makes more sense than the secong hypothesis od motion acclimation
Thanks for explaining it so clearly, the video just kinda confused me
I feel like periferal vision is key thing cause when i do that cross eye thing with two faces overlaping i see them perfectly fine
When those faces are upside down, they're creepily uncanny. Then when you turn them around it gets worse.
Genuinely think that tripped off a LSD flashback doing that “look at hand” thing!
Very disturbing. I need a cup of tea to recover.
Just make sure it's not ayahuasca tea....
@@tiagotiagot what hand? i was moving my eyes away from the screen towards the door and the entire room was moving
Yep, shot straight back to a mushroom trip I had almost 2 decades ago... remarkably vivid flashback. Didn't know those memories were still rattling around in there.
I looked at the apple I was eating while staring at the moving stripes before Steve explained it and it was a pretty wtf moment.
3:08 nope, looks about right.
Me_IRA
What about if you flashed many faces of the thatcher illusion? and would there be a difference between thatcher faces being flashed and just upside down faces?
If I understand correctly, you're talking about when the whole face is just upside down, and when it's been doctored so the eyes and lips alone are still the right way up as in the vid. I wonder what the difference in recognition rate would be. And if it's higher in the latter case, what would that demonstrate?
I found it more interesting to look at Steve after that illusion rather than my palm
5:57 motion illusion starts. For people who want to retry it
If you pause the video during the flashed face illusion, the effect continues so long as you keep staring at the cross. It's interesting that it doesn't go away over time.
Guitar Hero causes hallucination too.
I like this warping effect you use to avoid jump cuts. nice attention to detail!
Well spotted!
I noticed the motion after effect years ago - when I was young. After riding on my bike (continuously) for a rather long time and then stopping on the side of the road, my surroundings (especially the road) seemed to move away from me.
Did anyone else see the noses disappear?
Mig fra rummet
I did
blind spot maybe?
Gareeb Scientist
I don't know
Lol yea
not for me.
I seen big heads small faces, long noses, big creepy smiles.. pretty much everything creepy
7:00 AAAAAAGH
Post-processing effects ON MY EYEBALLS
This is VERY FREAKY
Didn't look at my hand. Had to back it up to make sure the pipes and whatnot in Steve's room were not actually wandering around in the video, just to make it more pronounced. (They were not.) Way freaky.
This might be the best channel on RUclips.
Interesing - I play most RUclips videos at double speed, to save time, and I found that the Faces Effect didn't come into play until I set the RUclips speed back to normal speed - perhaps that suggests something about the time it takes for a face to get 'embedded'/seen as the normal by the human brain? If others want to see whether they still see the effect or not viewing the video at double speed, it could be useful for data's sake, or if I'm just an abberation.
Conor O'Neill The zebra effect worked perfectly for me atleast though at 2x. There maybe isn't a correlation between the patterns and the faces.
it still worked for me
The effect still happens to me on double speed, that's odd o_o
I still got the effect at 2x speed, but it appeared less pronounced. It appears to support the theory of having the first image embedded in your mind before the image is replaced by another. If the pictures hang around for longer, it gives your brain more time to focus on each image before it changes.
Both effects in this video worked on my brain at 1.9x speed.
The most bizzare part of the thatcher illusion in my opinion is how she is looking at you when it's upside down but when you flip it appears as if she is staring down. I don't get how that part works.
You just helped me understand something that happens to me a LOT playing Rocket League. Sometimes I watch YT'ers or Streamers whose camera settings are way further away than what I normally use. Then when I go back into the game myself I feel like the ball is way bigger for me than it was for them. Like the ball itself changed sizes, not the camera distance that became closer... That's probably just my brain being used to the far away, smaller ball, being like "Woah this one is HUGE compared to the other one." Mind Blown.
Why aren't you showing me these videos on my damn homepage RUclips!
When you introduced the upside down face with the flipped eyes and mouth, I *instantly* realized the eyes were upside down, but it wasn't until you flipped it that I saw the mouth was too. Weird how that happens.
That was absolutely mad. I looked at the faces as soon as I saw something strange and realised the difference when looking at the cross versus at the images. Such fun.
Woooooah that movement thing is trippy. Played it like five or six times just to stare at a random part of the room. Weirdly enough, it seems that everything is distorted initially, but it quickly starts to morph back to what it's supposed to look like. Makes me think about how distorted my vision is normally...
I had a very vivid experience of neural adaptation once when I was playing a platformer game set in a circular world. After spending quite a long time looking at a scene with a floor that curved slightly downwards, when I looked back at the real world, for a couple of minutes all horizontal lines appeared to be curved upwards.
2:47 c'mon, it's just my ordinary expression as soon as I look at the bills on the restaurant.
0:02 Whoa Steve, that's easily the most excited I've ever heard anybody sound about SquareSpace. Don't oversell it.
I've experimented with tge stripes for 10 minutes now and I have a headache. ugh...
Kees Reuzelaar Well doing this for 10 minutes can't be a normal thing for a brain to process so I don't think I need to but thank you. It was also a pretty short one.
Kees Reuzelaar But I agree that it isn't normal.
Woah that hand thing was pretty scary. It took a few moments to wear off. I already thought now my brain is broken and everything will be moving weirdly back and forth in my view.
Steve Mould Around 03:47 in the above video, your image in the portrait frame looks quite like our friend Patrick McGoohan. I wouldn't mind seeing a side by side comparison. Your videos are alway interesting. Keep on keeping on.
4:00 "The facial recognition network has been trained for millions of years of evolution"
It also is trained as you get older. Babies can't really see faces.
Who told you that??
7:00 If you pause the video here, you get the motion reversal illusion even more strongly -- it looks like all the stripes are moving the other way!
As a long time fan of that red pipe behind you, this video pleases me.
dude this is freaking my bean
I wonder if people that are really good at drawing caricatures see everyone like that all the time...
When did i subscribe to you? God i need to stop drinking
Edit: never mind, cool channel. Cheers
That's funny because I also don't remember subscribing to this channel or seeing this guy before, but am now glad I did.
Try taking two pictures at different highs at the same time (like a stereo photo but up and down rather then left and right) then put the pictures to left and right and look at them as a stereo image. It is really creepy and cool.
Civilized man has lost the ability to spot aliens posing as humans. By concentrating on the cross, we free up the subconscious mind and it's able to recognize alien faces again.
5:11 "It's only something that happens on television screens"
except in my dreams
7:08 Woah. When I looked at my feed, all my videos' thumbnails were growing and shrinking.
going from no teeth image to an image with teeth is the most terrifying thing
If you watch this on your phone or tablet, pause the video and skip to 2:25
Now keep your phone horizontally level and turn the phone/tablet back and forth between the image being upside down or right side up. It looks like the eyes are following you.
I wonder wohat would happen if you combined the Thatcher illusion and the alien faces illusion. Since they mess with the same part of your brain
Good video and for all the head shots I thought it worth mentioning you look well, so hope you’ve been feeling well.
The title of this video was originally "Steve Mould's Guide to a Drug Free Acid Trip"
[6:00] I looked away to rewind the video before being told to look away.
*I was really caught off guard.*
So fascinating thing I tested out. In case anyone contested that the rotated images changed during rotation (not me, but say, someone else), I paused Margaret Thatcher's image and rotated it myself. It was the same effect as this video demonstrated. (BTW, I did it on the horizontal plane or RUclips reorients the video on my fon :P )
What I discovered was that the upside down "rightness" of the image not only fails at 180 degree rotation (right side up), but also at 90 and 270 degrees (sideways).
I took it further and tried to see exactly where the "rightness" failed, and it was anything more than 45 degrees (diagonally) away from the upside down (mega gorgon).
Anyone else? Anyone care? :D. I found it fascinating.
Love that u inspire me to do science, Mr. Mould. Thanks for the vid!
Gotta tune down the outro volume a bit....
0:45 I saw a green face and... it was scary and, it is 1 AM and I am not watching the rest of it.
One of the coolest videos yet. Next to how shampoo falls
After that illusion i looked at my boat simulator game and looked like the boat was in an anime slide going super fast. Loved it. Thanks.
First time I've ever watched a video that says "now stare at your Palm" but it was interesting effect.
Turning the Thatcher Illusion into the May Illusion mid-May?
Brilliant!
0:56 was the funniest one it was the troll face grin lmao.
I hate how a truly interesting video like this only gets 80,000 views after almost one year whereas a clickbaity title with nothing interesting gets millions of views.
Oh, man, Dr. Grime's manipulated picture looks like a serial-killer mug shot when turned right-side up. Terrifying!
Curios to know if the distortions are seen by everyone the same way, or if each of us has a slightly different experience regarding the distorted attributes.
There's a sort of a reverse Thatcher effect also: have your friend lie down, with the lower part of their face (everything below the eyes) obscured with a piece of paper or something. You then make eye contact with them from above their head so that their face is upside down in your field of view. After a while, your brains starts to think you are face to face with someone without a nose or a mouth, but with a bushy beard (assuming they have hair).
(Discovered this with friends back when we were kids, don't know if has a designated name.)
Ugh, Jake Paul.
Nothing changed with my view when I saw him, maybe his face is grotesque enough already...
dorgesh lul same
Kill it with fire.
@@Dorgpoop same
This guy's account pic makes this comment read weirdly
Wow staring at my hand looked like i just ate some special mushrooms
outta no where it goes "criminal, criminal, criminal"
Wait did you edit that photo of Theresa May? Looked normal to me...
That's what Theresa May looks like as she stalks the unwary through a wheat field at night.
"Look how swole the pope is" is not a sentence I expected to hear.
Grime and Mould. Still my favourite RUclips team up.
I’ve been waiting for you to upload.
I did notice eyes being upside down at the first image sooner than you spoke about it :) Maybe it is because I tend to look at the eyes most of the time.
My first thought was "persistence of vision" and that was what you described after the motion after affect.
wow, the first experiemt was super weird. Not only did the proportions look cartoonish (except for Micheal for some reason xD), but some of the faces had even facial features missing. Like the nose or even the whole face just got blank, like someone just photoshoped it out and it was just skin. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. But when I looked at it it was there. So weird.
btw. really love your videos. c:
I liked the video just because of the effort in the description
Welp, Casey Neistat's pic didn't change. Lol ;-]
Maybe hes an alien.
Well he's so, so handsome. So.
7:00 my hand didn't shrink/change size, but:
the contents of my stomach wanted to be free;
my eyes couldn't stop blinking and excreting moist;
I became lightheaded;
this was bad for my vision full-stop
Yet another great video. I looked at my hand and it was really freaky. I was reminded of pulling on the legs of your trousers outwards for an amount of time, and then when you stop pulling on the trousers your arms seem to rise up from the sides.
If the first hypothesis for the flashed face distortion effect is true, then changing the order of the faces should potentially produce a different illusion: someone's features would be relative to the previous face, so for instance, someone's eyes should appear too small or too big depending on the face flashed before. I don't think that's what's happening, but I suppose it could be tested with relative ease.
When I was watching the illusion, I was like:
Hey! That's Brady!
Hey! That's Matt!
James!
Tom!
Hey!
Michael!
Jake!
HEY!!!
Very impressive. The illusion and the probable explanation. Had a moment of the 'joy of learning'.
Maybe it’s because there is a spatial mapping that “normalizes” the face. It would move all the parts in, out, up down etc as needed so that they were in the right places for some other part of the brain to read the expression or do some other further processing. Think of the mapping like a funhouse mirror perfectly designed to make your face look average in proportion. This mapping would need to be recalibrated for each face. The calibration is normally automatic, but something about the presentation of the illusion breaks it. When a face is viewed with the wrong mapping in place, it actually makes the face appear distorted, in the same manner as one of those perfect funhouse mirrors, but applied to the wrong face. Instead of normalizing the face, it shifts everything the wrong way and distorts it.
3:10 what do you mean the features look upside down? Isn’t May always like this anyway?
I was looking to the side of your face the entire video.
Some of these RUclipsrs look like aliens already. No optical illusions needed.
"Now stare at the palm of your hand."
Holy sh!7, *am I high?*
Love the frame morph at 45 seconds! Nice
When you stare at something without blinking for an extended amount of time in a poorly lit room (a lot of things there) you start seeing distorted things too. Maybe that exaggerates this effect since you are staring at a stationary point and the fact that the faces change in a quickish manner might make you are less likely to blink.
Pedro Lenzi the effect takes place after almost a second of looking at the center, and keeps working when i blink or look to the sides for a bit.
DUDE... almost every youtuber that showed up are my favorites lol
This is quite late after this video was posted but, I could get my brain to produce the alien faces elusion while you are talking by looking at the bolts of the eye beam behind you.
You had the perfect opportunity to make jacksfilms forehead even bigger
Its crazy how as soon as you talk about squarespace you look away from the camera, explenations?
this is legit worse then a bad mushroom trip because I recognize I'm sane as I look at it.
Just found your channel and you’re 3 subs away from 200k!! Congratulations 🎊
The upside down faces look almost as crazy before you flip them to me.
Very good video as always.
Thanks!
7:00 The soup I'm eating is burbling and it's not even on the stove.
0:51(left) 0:53 (right) You are a beautiful thing!
The distortions seem to have a grain of truth. When I looked straight at the faces, I noticed that the distortions were in fact an exageration of facial features as well as expressions.
In order to test the second hypothesis, you could examine reactions to “average” feature sizes. A more likely hypothesis, though, is that feature perception has to do with the “normal” eye-tracking during initial (and successive) impression creation (meeting someone and/or analyzing emotion)...when the brain tries to analyze without relying upon the eyes’ ability to move, perceptions of first-priority features are enhanced by the brain (making them appear larger).