The Math Instinct by Keith Devlin

Author:Keith Devlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786736188
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

(b) Stare at this picture face on and the three rows will fall into three distinct layers, the aircraft at the back, the small clouds standing out from the page, and the large clouds farther out still. This is not perspective, but a genuine visual perception of three dimensions.

Yet another way to fool the visual system is to present it with an environment for which neither evolutionary history nor prior experience has prepared it. This is the basis behind those amazing distorting rooms in which a small child can seem to tower over her mother. (You can find them at museums, such as the Exploratorium in San Francisco, or at commercial recreation sites such as the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, California.) These are the brainchild of the painter and psychologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. The idea is to build an irregularly shaped room so that, when an observer looks in through a peephole (on whose position the entire design of the room depends crucially), it looks like an ordinary rectangular room. This is done by angling the walls, floor, and ceiling appropriately, drawing lines on the walls, floor, and ceiling (to appear as parallel and perpendicular to one another), and sometimes placing carefully located objects, themselves designed to appear regular though in fact being quite irregular. (See figure 8.7.) When an observer peers in through the peephole, all the visual clues tell him that what he is seeing is a perfectly ordinary room. Thus, the eye-brain visual system processes the scene as if that is exactly what is there. The result is that the observer automatically and subconsciously adjusts the perceived heights of the mother and child to match the environment. Since our minds know that the farther away an object is, the smaller it appears, the daughter, who appears to be much farther away than the mother, but in reality is much closer, is seen as being bigger than her mother.

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