this is very, very important, more so than the presentation I have yet to finish for a HUGE meeting tomorrow:
which way is the dancer turning?
I don't want to ruin the trick by saying too much before you click over, but first: I definitely see it the right-brain way (yaaaaaaay lefties), but for the life of me I can't see how the left-brain way could possibly be right. do any of you bori--I mean, logical right-handers see it the left-brain way? can you (and now I'm pointing at *you*, neuroscientist) explain why this happens and why it's so hard to see it both ways?
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I see it turning clockwise... I don't understand how you could see it NOT turning clockwise. I also get the right brain-left brain stuff confused.
maybe I should give both halves of my brain a rest... *yawn*
Ack! I get clockwise and counter confused, but I see it going counter-clockwise. Kat: when you see it going clockwise, what are you focusing on? I'm looking at how the arm and legs are moving
see, I'm watching the right hand lead her around clockwise, and for a split second I *almost* saw her go counter-clockwise but then it was gone. brains are so weird...
this link has officially made the office rounds, and several people have said that the dancer randomly changes directions. however, I am apparently physically incapable of seeing anything but clockwise. one of my co-workers just spent five minutes pointing out every time she switched, and it was a total waste of her time.
and actually, your responses are surprising -- left-handers should see it clockwise (right-brain dominant), and vice versa. you guys are weird :-P
I don't think there's anything right-brained / left-brained about it... in fact, that left brain / right brain stuff is mostly BS. I mean, certain cognitive abilities are lateralized to at least some extent, including handedness of course, but effects of handedness have little to do with those other capacities (although it's true that left-handers sometimes have language ability on their right side of the brain instead of the left [where virtually all right-handed people have their primary language areas], although other left-handers have language on the left like normal people, and still others have it on both sides).
At any rate, this is just a standard bistable illusion like the faces and vases picture or whatnot... this one just happens to be particularly compelling once you fix on one interpretation or another.
The easiest way I've found to switch is to attentionally ignore the dancer and read some of the words on the lower left (in those lists of supposed left- and right-brained qualities). If you happed to shift your attention/eyes from one word/line to another in such a way that you come out of the saccade when the dancer's position is particularly ambiguous, sometimes the apparent direction of rotation will switch. I haven't investigated it too carefully, but I would suspect it has something to do with whether your eyes were moving left or right when you came out of the saccade.
(You guys do know that you're essentially blind when your eyes are moving, right? It's just that your brain fills in the gaps, although it only does that with what you're actually attending to, hence the fact that if you REALLY ignore the dancer and focus on the words, you are essentially seeing it anew every time you shift your eyes among the words.)
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