Can You See It? Bizarre Optical Illusion Tricks Your Brain Into Distorting Celebrity Faces Into Terrifying MONSTERS – Here’s How It Works

From the cigar in the brickwork to ‘The Dress’, many optical illusions have baffled viewers around the world over the years.

But the latest illusion is probably one of the most bizarre, causing your brain to transform the faces of celebrities into terrifying monsters.

This powerful illusion, also known as the “flash face distortion effect,” is an example of how our brains work in strange ways to fill in the gaps in our perception.

In a TikTok video demonstrating the illusion, Dr Karan Raj, a general surgeon at the NHS in Hampshire, explains: ‘It’s an example of your brain trying to fill in the gaps based on its memory and experience, similar to how it does with your blind spot.’

He added: “This is going to scare you to death.”

To try the illusion, keep your eyes focused on the cross in the center of the screen as the celebrities’ faces flash by.

If you keep your eyes focused on the cross in the center and look at the faces from your peripheral vision, they will appear distorted.

“Your favorite celebrities turn into terrifying monsters with grotesque features,” the video explains.

However, when you pause the video and look more closely at the faces, their features appear to return to normal.

On TikTok, people responded en masse to the post to express their horror at what they had seen.

“I’ve watched it 5 times. It’s really scary,” wrote one commenter.

A commenter added: ‘I was shocked. I blinked my eyes, they were ‘normal’ and then they got distorted.’

Meanwhile, another wrote: ‘Mom, I’m scared, I want to go home.’

Fortunately, this is not a supernatural phenomenon, but a well-documented optical illusion called the “flash distortion effect.”

Dr. Raj explains that this is an example of your brain making assumptions about what it should see when it doesn’t have all the information.

He says, “For example, if your brain thinks it sees a big nose, it will magnify that feature into a grotesque shape.”

Interestingly, unlike many other optical illusions, this phenomenon was only discovered relatively recently.

The flashing facial distortion effect was first described in 2011 by a team of researchers from the University of Queensland.

In the video, pairs of celebrity faces flash across the screen at high speed. As you focus your eyes on the faint cross in the center of the image, the celebrity faces begin to transform into grotesque monsters

As Dr. Raj points out, this effect is especially pronounced when the face shown has a prominent feature, such as a large nose or forehead.

In their article, published in the magazine Perceptionthe researchers described the effect as follows: ‘When you look at the faces on a computer screen, each face appears to become a caricature of itself, and some faces appear very deformed, even grotesque.’

As Dr. Raj noted, the researchers also found that the effect was most pronounced in faces that had a particular feature that made them distinctive.

For example, the researchers found that if the person in the photo had a large forehead, the resulting illusion would be an unusually large forehead.

What’s so strange about the face-flash distortion effect is that scientists still don’t fully understand how it works.

In 2019, researchers from North Dakota State University found that the effect did not depend on mechanisms unique to our face perception.

They found that showing faces with makeup or reversing the images, which normally have a large effect on face perception, did not change the degree of distortion.

However, highly unusual for an optical illusion, giving participants more time to look at the faces actually caused them to experience more distortion.

They write: ‘It is unclear why prolonged viewing does not ultimately attenuate the effect, especially if participants could adapt to something that resembles the average face across all samples in the set.’

These researchers suggest that the effect is likely caused by the blurring of objects in our peripheral vision, but ultimately conclude that “despite the illusion’s popularity, there is no clear consensus about its basis.”

WHAT IS THE DELBOEUF ILLUSION?

The Delboeuf illusion is a type of visual illusion in which a dot surrounded by a large ring is typically perceived as smaller than an equally large dot surrounded by a small ring.

This optical trick works because your brain perceives the dot in the context of the outer ring.

It is named after the Belgian philosopher and mathematician Joseph Remi Leopold Delboeuf (1831 – 1896), who created it in 1865.

The Delboeuf illusion is a type of visual illusion in which a dot surrounded by a large ring is typically perceived as smaller than an equally large dot surrounded by a small ring.

As for plate size, the theory goes that people with smaller plates think they have more food.

However, new research suggests that hungry people can accurately report the portion size of food they eat, regardless of how it is served.

According to the researchers, this suggests that hunger stimulates a stronger analytical processing that is less likely to be misled by the illusion.

However, it is generally accepted that the Delboeuf illusion also works in other contexts.