Not What They Seem?

A gathering of neuroscientists and psychologists -- otherwise known as a group that nobody else wants to hang around, because they would know just how messed up both your mind and your brain were by the way your eyes blinked -- has selected their winners in a "Best Visual Illusions" contest.

The prizes were awarded at the Naples Center for the Philharmonic Arts in Naples, Florida, which is proof that the people who thought up this contest are smarter than any group I'm connected with. I'm a United Methodist pastor, and three of our last four church-wide General Conferences have been in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Fort Worth.

In any event, this is the fifth edition of the contest, in which people design simulations that show how normal functions of our brains and eyes combine to fool us into thinking we see something we really don't see. Sometimes the illusions reveal new information to the scientists who study them as well.

To make the third-place illusion, a guy at Harvard did a little digital retouching of a photo of a person's face and showed his original and the new pic side-by-side. People thought one picture was of a man and one was of a woman, even though all the man did was use some deeper shadows to make the features more defined in one picture. This may have something to do with Harvard's Hasty Pudding theater group in which men dress like women, or not.

The second place illusion shows how afterimages of color linger and fill white spaces in a picture. A Tel Aviv University researcher made an animation that moves a white dove across a blank white space. The blank space flashes a color for a second and then flashes it off. Even though the dove remains white, the eye tends to fill it in with an afterimage of color. The dove carries a paintbrush in its mouth, and since we know doves can't write, it obviously intends some nefarious and vandalistic acts -- which we all know doves don't need pens to commit.

The winner demonstrates how a curveball seems to break to one side in a batter's vision. When the pitcher throws a curve, the spin makes the air on one side of the ball move faster than the other, pushing it in a fairly gentle curve. But because the ball travels from our peripheral vision when it's close to the pitcher to the center of our vision when it gets close to the plate, it can seem to break in one direction quite suddenly. Such a break explains a significant percentage of my strikeouts when I was a kid -- although not all of them.

The Bucknell University professor who developed the animation says that because the ball seems to shift suddenly, a hitter's timing can be thrown off, and the curveball is tougher to hit. Perhaps. Longtime baseball movie fans, of course, have heard an alternate explanation.