Amazing and weird fact about the strange face illusion:
Did You Know? An unwavering stare with another person makes you uncomfortable. But if held for as little as one minute it might just give you nightmares. source
The perceptual phenomena known as strange face illusion was first described by the psychologist Giovanni Caputo of the University of Urbino, Italy in 2010. In a recent study participants included portrait artists who were able to create graphical depictions of what they saw.
The two volunteers settled in their seats and locked eyes—feeling a little awkward at first, but suppressing uncomfortable smiles to comply with the scientist’s directions. Ten minutes had seemed like a long stretch to look deeply into the eyes of a stranger, but time started to lose its meaning after a while. Sometimes, the young couple felt as if they were looking at things from outside their own bodies. Other times, it seemed as if each moment contained a lifetime. Throughout their close encounter, each member of the duo experienced their partner’s face as everchanging. Human features became animal traits, transmogrifying into grotesqueries. There were eyeless faces, and faces with too many eyes. The semblances of dead relatives materialized. Monstrosities abounded.When staring at an unchanging scene for a prolonged period humans experience the perceptual vanishing of objects and scenes, this is known as Troxler's fading.
When we stare at an unchanging face for a long time (our own face in the mirror, or the face of the person sitting in front of us), our visual neurons decrease their activity, making facial features fade and disappear (and then reappear when we blink or move our eyes). In the absence of such visual information, our brain is bound to “fill in” the gaps according to our neural wiring, expectations, and experiences—sometimes with fantastical results.
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