LEFT BRAIN-RIGHT BRAIN Optical Illusion

Recently, Channel News Asia ran an in-house advertisement showing a woman in silhouette spinning. The advertisement voice-over says that if you see the woman spinning clockwise, then you are a RIGHT-BRAIN person. However, if you see the woman spinning counter-clockwise, then you are a LEFT-BRAIN person.

Every time I saw the advertisement, I could only see the woman spinning clockwise (which meant I was a RIGHT-BRAIN person). I found it hard to accept that some people will see the woman spinning counter-clockwise. I tried to focus my mind to "see" the woman spin in the counter-clockwise direction, but as the CNA advertisement ran for only a short 30 seconds each time it was played on the TV, there was never enough time for me to accomplish this.

Today, I found the spinning woman optical illusion on this web site:

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492511-5005375,00.html

Now that I have more time to look at the optical illusion, I found that indeed, if I focus on the image in a special way, I can see the woman spinning in the other direction.

By default, I always see the woman spinning in the clockwise direction. To trick my brain to see her spin in the counter-clockwise direction, I have to turn my head 90 degrees to the right of the picture, and then do a side-glance on the image (which is now on my left), using periphery vision from my right eye to see the picture. When I glimpse at the picture through this sideways glance, I can make my mind see the woman spinning counter-clockwise. Once my brain has locked on to the counter-clockwise spinning image, I can then turn my head to gaze directly at the picture while holding on to the counter-clockwise spinning image.

Interestingly, if I lose my concentration for a while, I will immediately see the woman spinning in the clockwise direction. The transition is quite startling. As I just cannot force my mind to see her spinning in the counter-clockwise direction if I am staring at the picture directly, I have to repeat the above exercise to see her spin in the opposite counter-clockwise direction again. I did this a few times to experience the "transition", and I am really rapt at the strange effect on my brain whenever the "transition" occurs.

I am sure some people have the ability to "switch" between the clockwise and counter-clockwise view while gazing directly at the picture. But I am not one of them.

According to the news article, a RIGHT-BRAIN person like me "uses feeling", is "big-picture oriented" among other traits, whereas a LEFT-BRAIN person would "use logic" and is "details oriented" etc. This is pseudo science, and is in the same group as other rubbish like horoscopes, palm reading, biorhythms to determine a person's character. There is absolutely no scientific foundation.