Dual or polysemantic images, as the Big Psychological Dictionary tells us, are explained by the fact that when perceiving such drawings, a person has different ideas that are equally consistent with what is depicted.
How many women do you see?
At first glance, 90% of people see an attractive girl of 20-25 years old, the remaining 10% see an old woman over 70 with a huge nose. For those who see the picture for the first time, it is difficult to see the second image.
Clue: A girl's ear is an eye elderly woman, and the oval of a young face is the nose of an old woman.
The first impression, according to psychologists, usually depends on what part of the picture your gaze fell on at the first moment.
After a little training, you can learn to order yourself who you want to see.
Psychiatrist E. Boringou used the portrait in the 1930s as an illustration for his work. The author of such an image is sometimes called the American cartoonist W. Hill, who published the work in 1915 in the magazine “Pak” (translated into Russian as “elf”, “fairy-tale spirit”).
But back in the first years of the 20th century, a postcard was issued in Russia with the same picture and the inscription: “My wife and my mother-in-law.”
The picture with two ladies can be found in many psychology textbooks.
Hare or duck?
Which character did you see first in the modern version of The Ehrenstein Illusion? The very first "duck-hare" drawing was published in Jastrow's book in 1899. It is believed that if children are shown the picture on Easter Day, they will be more likely to see it as a rabbit, but if shown to them in October, they will tend to see a duck or similar bird
Clue: In the picture you can see a duck, which is directed to the left, or a hare, which is directed to the right.
Singing Mexicans or old men?
Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo is the author of rather unusual paintings with hidden meanings. If you look closely, you will see another, hidden image in each of his drawings. He has designed sets for more than 120 Mexican and American films. He created several portraits of famous people of the Western world in a surreal style (“Portrait of the singer Cher”, “Portrait of the actress Jane Fonda”, “Portrait of Jimmy Carter”, etc.).
Clue: The old man and the old blonde woman look at each other. Their eyebrows are the hats of Mexican musicians, and their eyes are the faces of musicians.
Just Rose?
At first glance, yes. An ordinary flower and nothing more. But it was not there. The author of this image, Sandro del Pre, formed a new direction in art, which he called “illusorism,” focusing on creating optical illusions when painting.
Clue: In the center of the rose you can see a couple kissing.
Old man or cowboy?
This painting by Ya. Botvinnik, first half of the twentieth century, USA, is called “My husband and my father-in-law.”
Who did you see first? Young man in a cowboy hat or an old man with a big nose?
Psychologists say that a person’s attitude towards himself influences the choice of image: with a positive attitude, people are more likely to perceive a young image in the first seconds.
Clue: The cowboy's neck is the old man's mouth, the ear is the eye, the chin is the nose.
What do you see in the sixth picture?
Leave your options in the comments to this article. The answer will appear at 13:00 on October 8, 2013.
Answer: Skull or young couple
.Look at the picture for a few seconds. 1. Then look at fig. 2 and describe in detail what you see in this second picture.
Rice. 1. Young woman
Do you see a woman? How old do you think she is? How does she look? How are you dressed? Who do you think she is?
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Most likely, you will describe the woman in the second picture as a person of about twenty-five - very attractive, elegantly dressed, with a small nose and reserved manners. If you weren't married, you would have hit on her. And if they worked in a fashion store, they would hire her as a fashion model.
What if I tell you that you are wrong? And if I say that the person in the picture is an elderly woman of about sixty or seventy, with a dull look, a huge nose, and, of course, not suitable for any models? This is the woman you'd probably want to help cross the road.
Who is right? Look at the picture again. Do you see the old woman now? If not, look again. See the big hooked nose? Handkerchief?
If we communicated in person, we would be able to discuss this picture. You would describe to me what you see, and I would tell you what I see. And we would continue to share opinions until we showed each other what each of us sees.
Rice. 2. Is the woman really young?
Since we cannot do this, I suggest you refer to Fig. 3, look at the image placed on it, and then return to Fig. 2. Now do you see the old woman? It is very important that you see it before you continue reading.
I first encountered this exercise many years ago as a student at Harvard Business School. With his help, the teacher wanted to show that two people, looking at the same thing, can see different things and both be right. It's not a matter of logic, but of psychology.
The teacher brought a stack of large cards, half of which had a picture of a young woman (Figure 1) and the other half of an older woman (Figure 3). He distributed cards with a picture of a young woman to students sitting in one part of the room, and cards with a picture of an older woman to those sitting in another part of the room. He suggested looking at the cards carefully, concentrating on the image for ten seconds, and then returning them. After that, he showed a picture on the screen (Fig. 2) combining both images, and asked the students to describe what they saw. Almost everyone who initially saw cards with a picture of a young woman saw exactly the young woman on the screen. And almost all of those who first saw the card with the image of an elderly woman now saw it on the screen.
The teacher then asked one student to explain to another, from across the room, what he saw. During their conversation, communication problems came to light.
What does "old woman" mean? This woman is no more than twenty - twenty-two years old!
Come on, come on! Are you joking? She is seventy years old, or even eighty!
What are you, blind? This is a young woman. Pretty. You can hit him for this one. She's just lovely!
Lovely? Yes, this is an old hag!
Rice. 3. Elderly woman
The dispute did not fade away, everyone was confident in their rightness and proved their position. And all this happened despite the fact that the students had a very important advantage, which we rarely have in real life: They knew from the very beginning of the experiment that there was a different point of view. And with all this, only very few have tried to look at the picture through the eyes of another person. After much arguing, one of the students came up to the screen and, pointing his finger at the line in the drawing, said:
This is a young woman's necklace! To which another objected:
What a necklace, that's an old woman's mouth!
Gradually calming down, they began to discuss individual differences. Finally, first one student, then another, saw that two images existed on the screen at the same time. Through calm, patient, detailed discussion, everyone in the room was able to see the picture from a different perspective. However, as soon as we turned away and then looked at the image again, almost each of us immediately saw the image that we had tuned in to during the first ten seconds of looking at the picture.
I often use this experiment in my work, both with individual clients and with organizations, because it allows us to make discoveries that are important for our personal effectiveness and the effectiveness of our interactions with other people. First of all, it demonstrates how powerfully givenness influences our perceptions, our paradigms. If a ten-second study of a picture can have such an impact on how we see an object, then what can we say about the power of influence of our life experience! Everything in our lives that can influence us - family, school, church, co-workers, friends, acquaintances and such modern social paradigms as personal ethics - all this has an impact on us that we are not aware of, contributing to the formation of our own system views, our paradigms, our maps. Moreover, this experiment shows that our paradigms are the source of our attitudes and behavior. Outside of them, we cannot act organically. We will simply lose our integrity if we say and do things that contradict our ideas. If you, being prepared to see a young woman, are exactly what you saw in the combined picture (this happens in 90% of cases), then you will undoubtedly find it difficult to think about helping her cross the road. Both your attitude towards this woman and your behavior must certainly be consistent with how you see her.
This reveals one of the weak points of personal ethics. Trying to change attitudes and behavior will be futile unless we examine the underlying paradigms from which those attitudes and behavior stem.
In addition, our example with pictures shows how much our paradigms influence the nature of our relationships with other people. As clearly and objectively as we think we see the world, we begin to realize that others see him differently, from their own, apparently equally clear and objective, point of view. “Where we stand depends on where we sit.”
Each of us is inclined to believe that he sees phenomena as they really are, i.e. that he is objective. However, this is not the case at all. We see the world not as it is, but as we ourselves are, or as we are determined to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we end up describing ourselves, our ideas, our paradigms. As soon as others disagree with us in their opinions, we immediately come to the conclusion that they are the ones who are wrong. However, as our experiment shows, everyone sees the same thing in their own way, through the prism of their own unique experience.
This does not mean that facts do not exist at all. In our example, two people, whose perceptions were initially programmed by different images, look at the combined picture together. Now they simultaneously see the same facts - a combination of black lines and white space - and both recognize them as facts. However, the interpretation of these facts by each of them depends on the original experience of each, and all these facts acquire meaning solely by virtue of their interpretation.
The more we understand what our basic paradigms, maps or ideas are, and the extent to which we are influenced by our own life experiences, the more responsible we are about our paradigms, studying them, comparing them with reality, listening to the opinions of others, becoming receptive to other people's views, thus developing a more complete understanding of reality, and therefore a more objective point of view.
Before this passage, Stephen Covey talks about the power of paradigms. And as an example he offers a small experiment.
We are accustomed to taking the world around us for granted, so we do not notice how our brain deceives its own masters.
The imperfection of our binocular vision, unconscious false judgments, psychological stereotypes and other distortions of worldview give rise to optical illusions. There are a huge number of them, but we tried to collect the most interesting, crazy and incredible of them for you.
Impossible figures
At one time, this genre of graphics became so widespread that it even received its own name - impossibilism. Each of these figures seems quite real on paper, but simply cannot exist in the physical world.Impossible trident
Classic blivet is perhaps the most striking representative of optical drawings from the “impossible figures” category. No matter how you try, you will not be able to determine where the middle prong originates.
Another shining example- impossible Penrose triangle.
It is in the form of a so-called “endless staircase”.
And also “The Impossible Elephant” by Roger Shepard.
Ames room
Issues of optical illusions interested Adelbert Ames Jr. early childhood. After becoming an ophthalmologist, he continued his research into depth perception, which resulted in the famous Ames Room. 
How does the Ames room work?
In a nutshell, the effect of Ames's room can be conveyed as follows: it seems that in the left and right corners of its back wall there are two people - a dwarf and a giant. Of course, this is an optical trick, and in fact these people are of quite normal height. In reality, the room has an elongated trapezoidal shape, but due to false perspective it appears rectangular to us. The left corner is farther away from the visitors’ view than the right, and therefore the person standing there seems so small. 
Movement Illusions
This category of optical tricks is of greatest interest to psychologists. Most of them are based on the subtleties of color combinations, the brightness of objects and their repetition. All these tricks mislead our peripheral vision, as a result of which the perception mechanism gets confused, the retina captures the image intermittently, spasmodically, and the brain activates the areas of the cortex responsible for recognizing movement.floating star
It's hard to believe that this picture is not an animated GIF, but an ordinary optical illusion. The drawing was created by Japanese artist Kaya Nao in 2012. A pronounced illusion of movement is achieved due to the opposite direction of the patterns in the center and along the edges. 
There are quite a few similar illusions of movement, that is, static images that appear to be moving. For example, the famous rotating circle.
Or yellow arrows on a pink background: when you look closely, they seem to sway back and forth.
Caution: This image may cause eye pain or dizziness in people with weak vestibular systems.
Honestly, this is a regular picture, not a GIF! Psychedelic spirals seem to drag you somewhere into a universe full of strangeness and wonder.
Changeling illusions
The most numerous and fun genre of illusion drawings is based on changing the direction of looking at a graphic object. The simplest inverted drawings just need to be rotated 180 or 90 degrees. 
Two classic illusions-shifters: nurse/old woman and beauty/ugly.
A more highly artistic picture with a trick - when turned 90 degrees, the frog turns into a horse.
Other "double illusions" are more subtle.
Girl/old woman
One of the most popular dual images was published in 1915 in the cartoon magazine Puck. The caption to the drawing read: “My wife and mother-in-law.” 
Old people/Mexicans
An elderly couple or Mexicans singing with a guitar? Most people see old people first, and only then their eyebrows turn into sombreros and their eyes into faces. The authorship belongs to the Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo, who created many illusion pictures of a similar nature. 
Lovers/dolphins
Surprisingly, the interpretation of this psychological illusion depends on the person’s age. As a rule, children see dolphins frolicking in the water - their brains, not yet familiar with sexual relationships and their symbols, simply do not isolate two lovers in this composition. Older people, on the contrary, see the couple first, and only then the dolphins. 
The list of such dual pictures can be continued endlessly:
In the picture above, most people see the Indian's face first, and only then look to the left and see the silhouette in the fur coat. The image below is usually interpreted by everyone as a black cat, and only then does a mouse appear in its outline.
A very simple upside-down picture - something like this can be easily done with your own hands.
Illusions of color and contrast
Alas, the human eye is imperfect, and in our assessments of what we see (without noticing it ourselves) we often rely on the color environment and brightness of the background of the object. This leads to some very interesting optical illusions.Gray squares
Optical illusions of colors are one of the most popular types of optical illusion. Yes, squares A and B are painted the same color. 
This trick is possible due to the way our brain works. A shadow without sharp boundaries falls on square B. Thanks to the darker "surrounding" and the smooth shadow gradient, it appears to be significantly lighter than Square A.
Green spiral
There are only three colors in this photo: pink, orange and green. Don't believe me? This is what you get when you replace pink and orange with black. 
Is the dress white and gold or blue and black?
However, illusions based on color perception are not uncommon. Take, for example, the white-gold or black-and-blue dress that conquered the Internet in 2015. What color was this mysterious dress really, and why did different people perceive it differently?The explanation of the dress phenomenon is very simple: as in the case of gray squares, everything depends on the imperfect chromatic adaptation of our visual organs. As you know, the human retina consists of two types of receptors: rods and cones. Rods capture light better, while cones capture color better. Each person has a different ratio of cones to rods, so the determination of the color and shape of an object is slightly different depending on the dominance of one or another type of receptor.
Those who saw the dress in white and gold noticed the brightly lit the background and decided that the dress was in the shade, which means White color should be darker than usual. If the dress seemed blue-black to you, it means that your eye first of all paid attention to the main color of the dress, which in this photo actually has a blue tint. Then your brain judged that the golden hue was black, lightened due to the sun's rays directed at the dress and the poor quality of the photo.
In reality the dress was blue with black lace.
Here's another photo that baffled millions of users who couldn't decide whether it was a wall in front of them or a lake.
Optical illusions on video
Ballerina
This crazy optical illusion is misleading: it is difficult to determine which leg of the figure is the supporting leg and, as a result, to understand in which direction the ballerina is rotating. Even if you succeed, while watching the video the supporting leg may “change” and the girl seems to begin to rotate in the other direction.The most popular optical illusion “Ballerina”
If you were able to easily fix the direction of the ballerina’s movement, this indicates a rational, practical mindset of your mind. If the ballerina rotates in different directions, this means that you have a wild, not always consistent imagination. Contrary to popular belief, this does not affect the dominance of the right or left hemisphere.
Monster faces
Of interest to lovers of unusual things is a chair designed by Chris Duffy. It appears to rest solely on its front legs. But if you risk sitting on it, you will understand that the shadow cast by the chair is its main support.
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"My wife and my mother-in-law"
If this is your first time seeing this famous illusion, what is the first thing you notice? Girl or old woman? And scientists took this moment - the first impression of the picture - to study the visual perception of a person and the influence of age on him.
Why was this particular illusion considered suitable? The fact is that the drawing is based solely on the perception of the face: either you can see a girl, or you can see the profile of an elderly woman looking solemnly towards the left side of the drawing. In any case, it is impossible to see both portraits at the same time.
So who's in the picture?
Girl or old woman?
Hint for those who only see the girl:
Do you see this? The young woman's chin doubles as the old woman's nose, and the old woman's chin is also the young woman's breasts.
Two psychology professors at Flinders University in Australia have just concluded that seeing and being aware of what you see has a lot to do with people's age. According to the study, a young man will see a young woman first, while older people will see an old woman.
The experiment involved 393 volunteers (242 men and 141 women) ranging in age from 18 to 68 years, although the average age was 32 years. They all showed the picture for seconds and then asked the gender and age of the person in the picture.
When the researchers separated the responses of 10% of the older volunteers from the 10% of the younger adults, they found that senior group I saw the old woman for the first time, and the young people saw the youngest woman. More precisely, it is this: people between the ages of 18 and 30 usually saw a girl, and those over 30 usually saw an elderly woman.
The purpose of the study was to determine whether highly age-related biases influence interpretation starting at the subconscious level.
Did this happen to you? Well, you might just not be as young as you think.
And I, in turn, ask myself:
Is this why the older generation (not all, of course, not all) so vehemently rejects innovation in art?
Does objective age perception interfere? The subconscious mind rebels against novelty, it’s not ours, they say, it’s not ours?
What do you think? Write, don't be shy).
Have you ever wondered how old you are? Many people believe that we only have one life and when it's all over there will be nothing left. But in many traditions there is a concept that the soul can have several lives.
Even if you don't know it, you may be young at heart. Or an old soul who holds within himself the wisdom of hundreds of past lives!
Now look carefully at the image and tell me what you saw first! Your answer will tell you what kind of soul you are.
If you saw a girl
You have a young soul that is taking its first steps in the earthly world. You are the one who is always surprised by this world, who always finds positive sides in everything.You don't have many wounds from past lives, and that's why you can be a little naive at times. You give yourself completely to things and people, even at the risk of mental trauma. It is important for you to feel and love everything you have!
You are an incredibly inquisitive person, always pursuing new goals. The bad thing is that you can often make mistakes, because the soul is at the learning stage.
If you saw an old woman
Your soul has already come a long way. Surely, you are the kind of person who more than once feels out of place in this world: you are too wise for your age, and you don’t like the same things as others.You've already been through it all. Your soul is very careful because it has already suffered many times. You are a person who takes care of himself, respects himself and, above all, knows what he wants and needs and focuses on it!
Don't waste time on things that have no value. You have learned to distinguish the important from the unimportant, and have learned to focus only on the important.
Life may be less exciting for you than it is for younger souls, but you have the advantage of being that much closer to achieving your life's true purpose!
