Which side ballerina spin

To me, this silhouetted woman looks like she's rotating counterclockwise, but every so often, for a fleeting moment, she reverses her spin. It's maddening, because I know this is all in my head. The spinning dancer is on an infinite loop. She never changes. Yet some people see her spinning clockwise, and some see counterclockwise. A video on Youtube explains that this has to do with which side of your brain is more dominant.

If your right hemisphere dominates, you see her spin clockwise; if your left brain dominates, then you see her move counterclockwise. And apparently, people with high IQs can see the girl spinning in both directions. Does that mean I'm a genius because I see her spin both ways, or an idiot because I can't control it?

I want to know what's going on in my brain, so I call up Arthur Shapiro and Niko Troje, a pair of scientists who dissect Kayahara's spinning girl in the forthcoming Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions. I run the Youtube theory by them. The reason we see her spinning in different directions is actually much more complex than which side of our brain dominates. I'm feeling good now, because I'm realizing that you don't have to be freaking Neil deGrasse Tyson to enjoy this thing.

I tell Shapiro and Troje how frustrating it is to feel powerless over my brain, and I ask if they can help me spin the spinning lady in both directions. They're game. But before they do, they say that it's important to understand that the spinning girl falls under a class of optical illusions called reversible images.

Premonitions Registry. Spirit Board Ouija. Transpersonal Science. The Spinning Dancer Illusion Which way is she spinning? The Spinning Dancer. Check out this extraordinary illusion. It may reveal which side of your brain is more active.

A moving rotating Necker cube can be seen here. Toppino, chair of the department of psychology at Villanova University. Sometimes, a person will stare at an image and it will never reverse. Toppino advises staring at one part of the image, such as the foot, and most of the time it will eventually flip. I tried this several times, but it never flipped. To see the lined image moving clockwise, click here.

To see it move counterclockwise, click here. The earliest I can reverse now is at a Also, it seems to really strain my head trying to reverse repeatedly. This type of thing happens to me when I watch car commercials. The tires appear to spin backwards to me. I mentioned this to my family and they all thought I was crazy. One is simply an optical illusion often referred to as the wagon-wheel effect, and the other is the fact that film moves at 24 or 30 frames a second — slower than our eyes process motion, creating the sense that the wheels are moving backward rather than forward.

Here is an NPR piece about why car tires appear to be rotating in the wrong direction. And for more here is a piece from the WiseGeek website. Finally, the image switched, and now I can only perceive it as spinning counter-clockwise.

About two thirds of viewers were able to reverse the direction of rotation from clockwise to counter-clockwise or vice-versa. Interestingly, this ability was affected by the initial direction of motion…If you saw the figure spinning counter-clockwise first, then you were significantly more likely to be able to reverse the direction of rotation than if you saw it spinning clockwise first.

How is it even possible for us to see a single image rotating in opposite directions?