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.

(As seen on TechRepublic Blog: Put your color printer to good use with this super-cool optical illusion)
Ok, this illusion is pretty darned cool. Basically, you print out this PDF and construct a paper sculpture of a dragon. It makes use of an inverted face illusion, so that if you close one eye while looking at it, it will look like it’s head is moving around to follow you. This video shows how strong the effect is.

I just printed out one myself, assembled it, and set it on the middle of the table in my lab’s common area. I wonder how my labmates will react when they see this tomorrow morning…