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The Great Book of Optical Illusions
It is said that "seeing is believing." But what if the picture you see is hard to believe? Maybe it appears to be something else entirely. In The Great Book of Optical Illusions , Al Seckel brings together a collection of fascinating visual puzzles and enigmatic designs that make the viewer How does this work? What does it really contain? From collections of baffling shapes that defy the viewer to work out the hidden figures, to dazzling patterns that appear to change on the page, here are optical illusions found in classical art and through history to the most modern of visual tricks. There are more than 280 color and black and white illustrations in the book, from Illusionworks, the world's leading brand of illusion artworks.
- GenresArtNonfiction
304 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 29, 2019
Most impressive
We see with our brains, something that is non-intuitive and not appreciated by most of us. We think we "see" something with our eyes. The ambient light bounces off of an object and into our eyes and is embedded there, and like a camera we "see." At any rate, that was my commonsense explanation of sight for the first few decades of my life.
Today I would say that our brain uses information from the light it gathers to interpret the world around us using its experience in seeing things in the past and using clues such as shadow and perspective to resolve objects. I would point out that we are actually aware of only a small faction of what there is to see at any given time. In addition to the "blind spot" in our vision field being filled in by our brains, much of the rest of our field of vision is constructed and reconstructed by our brains continually giving us the illusion of continuous sight. Unless there is movement or some other kind of change, we continue to experience the same reconstruction, like a screen being refreshed. If we focus on something in the field that previously was in our periphery, our brain reconstructs that something based on this new, more direct information.
Proof of this somewhat bizarre and perhaps unsettling truth that we construct the world in our brains comes from experiments in perception by scientists, but can also be revealed though the work of artists. What Al Seckel, who teaches at Cal Tech, has done here is collect almost three hundred optical illusions done by artists, some familiar, but many not so familiar, "so that the reader has a much greater chance of being surprised." Variations on some of Escher's themes including his impossible staircases are included. There are impossible triangles and impossible cubes, some constructed from objects using mirrors. There are drawings like the famous young girl/old hag that pop in and out definition as our eyes fatigue from one to the other--included here on p. 87 as "My Wife and Mother-in Law." There are pictures in which a person is smiling and then when turned upside down, the picture becomes someone else frowning.
Other forms include lines and shadings that appear to move, black and white designs that trick the eye into seeing color, a photomosaic of a tiger made entirely of animal pictures and a dog similarly constructed.
Famous artists include Rene Magritte, Escher, Salvador Dali, and others. There are photos of three-dimensional illusions including "Haemaker's Impossible Twisted Rectangle" which must be seen from a particular angle for the illusion to manifest itself. There are grid illusions in which dots appear at intersections only to disappear when looked at directly ("Hermann Grid Illusion). There are plays with curved lines that look straight and straight lines that appear to curve. One glittering picture, a "Twist on Reginald Neal's Square of Three" (p. 280) literally made me dizzy.
Not included is one of my favorite illusions that I originally got from a Native American basket tray. It is composed of dark and light squares arranged in diamond shapes one within the other so that differently constituted squares, and even the illusion of circles, pop in and out of existence. Sometimes there is the illusion of a vague green or red tint among the black and white.
Also not included is the imbedded arrow on the side of the Fed Ex truck (see if you can find it next time a Fed Ex truck goes by!) although a more sophisticated form of the same thing is on page 66 called "Time Saving Suggestions." There are no examples of the relatively new street art phenomenon in which the ground is painted elaborately in such a way as to give the illusion of depth, showing someone crawling out a hole in the ground where there is no hole.
The most maddening illusion for me is "Shepard's Tabletop" on page 10. There are two tables, one that seems thinner and longer than the other. You've probably seen this illusion or a variant. So powerful are the perceptive clues that it is impossible to believe that the surfaces of the tables are identical until you take out a ruler and measure the sides!
Many of illusions depend for their effect on "false shading" or misleading perspective clues. Our eyes are used to the light coming from above (Microsoft shades its dialogue and text boxes in such a way--check and see!) so that when something is shaded from below, as is one of the objects in "Shape from Shading" (p. 45), our eyes see the object differently. In this case the objects shaded from above look like spheres while the one shaded from below appears concave. Turn the picture over and the concave becomes a sphere. Our brains compensate for shadow so that when something appears to be in shadow our brains maintain the color or shade of the object as though it were not in shadow.
Seckel includes remarks about the illusions on the page on which the illusions appear, and then, for most of them, further comments or explanations are included in notes at the end of each of the chapters. Sometimes however nothing is explained and at other times there is only a partial explanation. I wish he had included all the remarks on the same page as the illusion. That way I wouldn't have to keep thumbing back and forth.
This is a book that can be flipped through, but for full effect the illusions need to be studied a bit, and for artists, they need to be studied a lot, since some of them are really amazing.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
We see with our brains, something that is non-intuitive and not appreciated by most of us. We think we "see" something with our eyes. The ambient light bounces off of an object and into our eyes and is embedded there, and like a camera we "see." At any rate, that was my commonsense explanation of sight for the first few decades of my life.
Today I would say that our brain uses information from the light it gathers to interpret the world around us using its experience in seeing things in the past and using clues such as shadow and perspective to resolve objects. I would point out that we are actually aware of only a small faction of what there is to see at any given time. In addition to the "blind spot" in our vision field being filled in by our brains, much of the rest of our field of vision is constructed and reconstructed by our brains continually giving us the illusion of continuous sight. Unless there is movement or some other kind of change, we continue to experience the same reconstruction, like a screen being refreshed. If we focus on something in the field that previously was in our periphery, our brain reconstructs that something based on this new, more direct information.
Proof of this somewhat bizarre and perhaps unsettling truth that we construct the world in our brains comes from experiments in perception by scientists, but can also be revealed though the work of artists. What Al Seckel, who teaches at Cal Tech, has done here is collect almost three hundred optical illusions done by artists, some familiar, but many not so familiar, "so that the reader has a much greater chance of being surprised." Variations on some of Escher's themes including his impossible staircases are included. There are impossible triangles and impossible cubes, some constructed from objects using mirrors. There are drawings like the famous young girl/old hag that pop in and out definition as our eyes fatigue from one to the other--included here on p. 87 as "My Wife and Mother-in Law." There are pictures in which a person is smiling and then when turned upside down, the picture becomes someone else frowning.
Other forms include lines and shadings that appear to move, black and white designs that trick the eye into seeing color, a photomosaic of a tiger made entirely of animal pictures and a dog similarly constructed.
Famous artists include Rene Magritte, Escher, Salvador Dali, and others. There are photos of three-dimensional illusions including "Haemaker's Impossible Twisted Rectangle" which must be seen from a particular angle for the illusion to manifest itself. There are grid illusions in which dots appear at intersections only to disappear when looked at directly ("Hermann Grid Illusion). There are plays with curved lines that look straight and straight lines that appear to curve. One glittering picture, a "Twist on Reginald Neal's Square of Three" (p. 280) literally made me dizzy.
Not included is one of my favorite illusions that I originally got from a Native American basket tray. It is composed of dark and light squares arranged in diamond shapes one within the other so that differently constituted squares, and even the illusion of circles, pop in and out of existence. Sometimes there is the illusion of a vague green or red tint among the black and white.
Also not included is the imbedded arrow on the side of the Fed Ex truck (see if you can find it next time a Fed Ex truck goes by!) although a more sophisticated form of the same thing is on page 66 called "Time Saving Suggestions." There are no examples of the relatively new street art phenomenon in which the ground is painted elaborately in such a way as to give the illusion of depth, showing someone crawling out a hole in the ground where there is no hole.
The most maddening illusion for me is "Shepard's Tabletop" on page 10. There are two tables, one that seems thinner and longer than the other. You've probably seen this illusion or a variant. So powerful are the perceptive clues that it is impossible to believe that the surfaces of the tables are identical until you take out a ruler and measure the sides!
Many of illusions depend for their effect on "false shading" or misleading perspective clues. Our eyes are used to the light coming from above (Microsoft shades its dialogue and text boxes in such a way--check and see!) so that when something is shaded from below, as is one of the objects in "Shape from Shading" (p. 45), our eyes see the object differently. In this case the objects shaded from above look like spheres while the one shaded from below appears concave. Turn the picture over and the concave becomes a sphere. Our brains compensate for shadow so that when something appears to be in shadow our brains maintain the color or shade of the object as though it were not in shadow.
Seckel includes remarks about the illusions on the page on which the illusions appear, and then, for most of them, further comments or explanations are included in notes at the end of each of the chapters. Sometimes however nothing is explained and at other times there is only a partial explanation. I wish he had included all the remarks on the same page as the illusion. That way I wouldn't have to keep thumbing back and forth.
This is a book that can be flipped through, but for full effect the illusions need to be studied a bit, and for artists, they need to be studied a lot, since some of them are really amazing.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
January 13, 2017
About 250 examples of optical illusions, although there are multiple different instances of some of them.
August 1, 2019
an incredibly engaging book that really makes you think... about how you think
April 29, 2013
It is what it purports to be! Illusions are segregated into galleries in no particular order or construction, so you will see several examples of the same type of illusion throughout the book. Illusions range from the classics to new artistic creations, which I really loved. Short notes about the more significant or difficult to solve illusions can be found at the end of each gallery. An excellent book for those interested in the fun of optical illusions with only a smattering of the science behind them.
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December 6, 2013How do you download the book?
May 7, 2014
Love this book fun fore and fun with the kids
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January 20, 2017Good fun, high quality book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews