Lateral Images and Surprising Illusions

I would like to share with you some images and illusions which demonstrate some points about lateral thinking, and they are great fun, I think. So let's start with this one, which is what the French would call a trompe-l'œil, a picture which deceives the eye, and it is a painting on the ceiling of a smoking room which gives the impression of people looking down on the smokers, and it sends a very Powerful message about the dangers of smoking in a very lateral way, I think, the use of that image. This is a picture on the side of a house. So, these gates— this chap has these gates on the side of his house, and he's mounted a photographic image of a car which creates the illusion that he's got a swanky sports car in his drive, but it's just a very clever image which deceives the eye. This is a very startling image, a juxtaposition of 2 different images, a woman looking out of her car window and the reflection of a lion taken in an animal park somewhere. It's just very, very striking. This is a good example of mathematics gone wrong. If you see this sign, the arithmetic is in fact correct, those numbers do add up to 4,663, but it's a nonsense addition. Which brings us on to the topic of perspective, and perspective is a very important aspect of lateral thinking. Where you stand determines how you view a situation. So, the giraffe here sees this woman, the model, as simply 2 orange circles because he is looking down on her. This is a marvellous map I found on the internet, and it's a map of the world. But it's different from our normal orientation. We normally see a Mercator representation of the world with north at the top and south at the bottom. But here we have south, as we would call it, on the right and north on the left. We've got South America in the top left and we've got India in the bottom right, Africa bottom left. And it's quite disturbing. It's quite shocking to see the Earth represented completely differently. And this is a very good illustration of perspective. So this is an object viewed from one side. Its silhouette looks like a square. Viewed from 90 degrees opposite, it looks like a circle. And it shows that the position of the viewer determines the image that the brain sees of any situation. And in order to change our view, we have to change our perspective, change our viewpoint. So, what does this picture show? This is a famous picture. It won a photographic contest, and you might think that the black shapes are camels, but they're not camels. They are the shadows of camels. This picture was taken very late in the day over a desert with the sun very low in the sky. The camels are in fact the white shapes that you can see. We're looking down on the camels, And because the sun is low in the sky, it's casting very long shadows on the sand. So what you see in black are not the camels, but the shadows of camels. And this is another view of perspective. These 2 monsters that you see running down here are exactly the same size if you measure them, and yet the one at the back looks much, much bigger because of the way the picture is drawn, because of the perspective. And that deceives the eye. These are the famous shepherd tables. If you look these up on the internet, on Google, you'll find various documentation about the shepherd tables, and they are in fact exactly the same dimensions. And yet you're convinced that they're not. You're convinced that the one on the right is squatter and the one on the left is longer. But if you measure them, you'll find that they both have exactly the same length and and exactly the same width, but because of the way they're set up, the eye is deceived, the brain is deceived. The Shepard tables, they're called. In this picture, if you look down at the bottom left, you will see black dots in the center of the matrix. There are in fact 12 of them in all, but the brain doesn't allow you to see them all. If you look at one, you'll see it, but you won't see the others. You have to look in different places to see them. This is a very famous illusion, and the 2 tiles A and B are exactly the same shade of grey. I'll say that again because you don't believe it. The 2 tiles A and B are exactly the same shade of grey, and there are ways you can prove this. If you search for this on the internet, you'll find explanations of it. It's partly the shadow of the green cylinder which deceives the eye and makes Tile B look much lighter in shade than Tile A, but in fact, trust me, they're both the same shade in reality. And here is a similar example: the 2 circles which have a red circle around them are exactly the same shade, but because of the colours around them, the eye is deceived. The one at the top looks pinkish and the one at the bottom left looks a sort of creamy yellow, but they are in fact exactly the same shade. If you remove the parallel lines, you'd see that. This is one of my favourite illusions because it is so desperately deceiving. The blue lines are parallel. They look as though they're converging or diverging, but they're exactly straight and parallel, and you can see this by looking at the black squares in the middle of them. They're the same size all the way across, and yet the lines appear to diverge. So the brain is completely fooled by the way this picture has been set up. And this is the same illusion: are the horizontal lines parallel or do they slope? They are in fact parallel. Similarly with this one, the image in the center is a perfect square, But it doesn't look like it. The lines look wobbly because of the way the other squares have been arranged. The brain is deceived. This illusion, if you look to one side or the other, sometimes the part in the middle looks as though it's moving. So, if you stare to one side of the image or the other, sometimes you get some movement, but there is no movement. This is not a video, it's a still image. And this is one of my favourites. It's a beautiful parrot, isn't it? Well, no, it's not. If you examine it very carefully, you'll see that it's a female, a woman who is shaped beautifully and painted beautifully to look like a parrot. So you can see the eye of the parrot painted on her forehead. You can see her arm folded over her head. with her hand bending over to look like the parrot's beak, and you can see her legs painted and pointing down. And it's just a remarkable piece of art and a remarkable piece of deception on the part of the artist. And I'll finish with this. This is one of my favourite images. The photographer has taken a picture of some washing hanging on a line, but he's done it so cleverly that it suggests something else very strongly. to our minds. We see it, we immediately think of an animal, and it's just a very clever piece of art, very clever piece of lateral thinking on the part of the artist. So, I hope you enjoyed those, and I hope you see that you can't always trust your brain. You have to check your assumptions, which is a key part of lateral thinking, and sometimes you have to change your perspective, take a different point of view in order to better understand a problem, an image, a situation.