Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain
O'Reilly has a successful line of "Hacks" books -- each of which offers 100 how-tos for getting the most out of software applications, web sites, or hardware like TiVo. The weirdest and most wonderful of the bunch is Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain, by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. The various hacks in the book are less about tweaking your brain, than they are about doing little exercises that show you how your brain works, and why it isn't always an accurate interpreter of reality.
The book has a quite a few entertaining optical and auditory illusions. One of my favorites is Hack #23: Adelson's checker shadow (shown here). Believe it or not, squares A and B are exactly the same shade of gray. Link
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I didn't doubt that you were telling the truth about the gray squares, and I've seen similar optical illusions before, yet I couldn't help opening the image in Photoshop and confirming it for myself. It's true, of course; the two squares are exactly the same shade.
LIES!
When i went to this link, the first illustration i saw "Color contrast: cube" immediately struck me as false. There was no way that those 2 colors were the same. I did a screen capture and isolated those patches myself in photoshop as well, and sure enough, they were not the same grey at all. 139,133,143(violet) and 134,137,130(yellow)
A guy at work did it the old fashioned way.
He printed out the image, snipped out squares, and had people compare them.
Cool site of course people!