June 2010 puzzles
June 2010's head-scratching puzzlers
The following are optical illusions. To learn why these illusions occur, click here or scroll down.
Take a look at the way this design pulses.
When you stare at this next image for a while, the curved lines seem to form crests and valleys of waves. They may even seem to move a little. If you stare some more, until your eyes get tired, you may also see phantom lines of color.
Why do these objects seem to move or become three dimensional? Because of "optical distortion".
When you look at anything that is close to you, the muscles around your eyes pull into a spherical shape to focus. But, because the lens of your eye isn't perfectly round, some parts of what you are looking at will be in focus and others will look blurry. Normally, these differences in the clarity of your vision are on the outer edge of the object you are looking at, so you can still do things like read words and recognize pictures. But, in an illusion such as these, it is impossible for you to focus clearly on all of it at once.
Now, your eyes are always making tine movements that you cannot prevent, no matter how hard you try. So the clear parts of the design and the blurry parts are constantly changing. This is what is called "optical distortion" and it is what make the picture seem to move, shimmer, swirl, pulsate or grow ridges.