Edge of Vision

A Caltech grad student’s random-ish musings about vision, brains, and artificial intelligence

Oct 11 2007

Spinning dancer illusion; left brain vs. right brain hype?

Posted by: neilh in Demos, Illusions, Neuroscience, tags: bistability

Many of you have probably seen this animation of a spinning dancer silhouette from the Daily Telegraph, as it’s been making the rounds on various blogs and social networking sites. It’s a neat animation, but the blurb also states the following:

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test … do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise? If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Personally, I can’t think of anything that would back up their source-less assertion, and a quick literature search doesn’t turn up anything either. I’ve chalked it up as a yet another misinformative popular-press write-up, but was wondering if any readers had further insight.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Demos, Illusions, Neuroscience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Spinning dancer illusion; left brain vs. right brain hype?”

Emily says:
December 1st, 2007 at 9:56 pm
me and my friends just got into a huge screaming match over this, trying to make each other see each way. after a LONG time i was finally able to see both ways, but i have to sort of look somewhere else, picture her going the other way and then look back. I read somewhere that it’s not actually a dancer spinning, but a 2-D dancer going back and forth but our brains are programmed to see it as a 3-D object spinning, which has nothing to do with left-brain vs right-brain dominance.