Customer Reviews

The Great Book of Optical Illusions

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This book has hundreds of drawings and photographs that trick the eye in one way or another (color, perspective, hidden pictures, illusions of movement, etc). After every 20 pages or so there is a page that has a one or two sentence blurb giving background information or commentary on each illusion.

My kids (ages 5 and 7) love looking through this book, and it's a great mental exercise for them, pondering how the effects are achieved and discovering what exactly the illusion is that's presented on each page. Note however, that some of the illusions are too cerebral for kids this age, or require too much patience to see.

I would have liked the book even more if it had a section that discussed the concept of illusion and how the biology of eyesight and psychology plays it's part.

Overall, an excellent book!

I was totally absorbed by this book. It is not often that I find a book that my whole family is fighting over to read! Every page was an absolute delight. I particularly enjoyed that the author did not speak down to his audience in his explanations, and that I gained some insight into how these illusions work, which for me was the most interesting part. Of course, the illusions were very very cool!!!!!

This book disappointed me. Because the first three sections are identical to 'Art Of Optical Illusions' which I'd already read. Even if you've already read 'Art Of Optical Illusions' the last sections of this book are worth reading.

AlettaJohnson

We see with our brains, something that is non-intuitive and not appreciated by most of us. We think we "see" something with our eyes. The ambient light bounces off of an object and into our eyes and is embedded there, and like a camera we "see." At any rate, that was my commonsense explanation of sight for the first few decades of my life.

Today I would say that our brain uses information from the light it gathers to interpret the world around us using its experience in seeing things in the past and using clues such as shadow and perspective to resolve objects. I would point out that we are actually aware of only a small faction of what there is to see at any given time. In addition to the "blind spot" in our vision field being filled in by our brains, much of the rest of our field of vision is constructed and reconstructed by our brains continually giving us the illusion of continuous sight. Unless there is movement or some other kind of change, we continue to experience the same reconstruction, like a screen being refreshed. If we focus on something in the field that previously was in our periphery, our brain reconstructs that something based on this new, more direct information.

Proof of this somewhat bizarre and perhaps unsettling truth that we construct the world in our brains comes from experiments in perception by scientists, but can also be revealed though the work of artists. What Al Seckel, who teaches at Cal Tech, has done here is collect almost three hundred optical illusions done by artists, some familiar, but many not so familiar, "so that the reader has a much greater chance of being surprised." Variations on some of Escher's themes including his impossible staircases are included. There are impossible triangles and impossible cubes, some constructed from objects using mirrors. There are drawings like the famous young girl/old hag that pop in and out definition as our eyes fatigue from one to the other--included here on p. 87 as "My Wife and Mother-in Law." There are pictures in which a person is smiling and then when turned upside down, the picture becomes someone else frowning.

Other forms include lines and shadings that appear to move, black and white designs that trick the eye into seeing color, a photomosaic of a tiger made entirely of animal pictures and a dog similarly constructed.

Famous artists include Rene Magritte, Escher, Salvador Dali, and others. There are photos of three-dimensional illusions including "Haemaker's Impossible Twisted Rectangle" which must be seen from a particular angle for the illusion to manifest itself. There are grid illusions in which dots appear at intersections only to disappear when looked at directly ("Hermann Grid Illusion). There are plays with curved lines that look straight and straight lines that appear to curve. One glittering picture, a "Twist on Reginald Neal's Square of Three" (p. 280) literally made me dizzy.

Not included is one of my favorite illusions that I originally got from a Native American basket tray. It is composed of dark and light squares arranged in diamond shapes one within the other so that differently constituted squares, and even the illusion of circles, pop in and out of existence. Sometimes there is the illusion of a vague green or red tint among the black and white.

Also not included is the imbedded arrow on the side of the Fed Ex truck (see if you can find it next time a Fed Ex truck goes by!) although a more sophisticated form of the same thing is on page 66 called "Time Saving Suggestions." There are no examples of the relatively new street art phenomenon in which the ground is painted elaborately in such a way as to give the illusion of depth, showing someone crawling out a hole in the ground where there is no hole.

The most maddening illusion for me is "Shepard's Tabletop" on page 10. There are two tables, one that seems thinner and longer than the other. You've probably seen this illusion or a variant. So powerful are the perceptive clues that it is impossible to believe that the surfaces of the tables are identical until you take out a ruler and measure the sides!

Many illusions depend for their effect on "false shading" or misleading perspective clues. Our eyes are used to the light coming from above (Microsoft shades its dialogue and text boxes in such a way--check and see!) so that when something is shaded from below, as is one of the objects in "Shape from Shading" (p. 45), our eyes see the object differently. In this case the objects shaded from above look like spheres while the one shaded from below appears concave. Turn the picture over and the concave becomes a sphere. Our brains compensate for shadow so that when something appears to be in shadow our brains maintain the color or shade of the object as though it were not in shadow.

Seckel includes remarks about the illusions on the page on which the illusions appear, and then, for most of them, further comments or explanations are included in notes at the end of each of the chapters. Sometimes however nothing is explained and at other times there is only a partial explanation. I wish he had included all the remarks on the same page as the illusion. That way I wouldn't have to keep thumbing back and forth.

This is a book that can be flipped through, but for full effect the illusions need to be studied a bit, and for artists, they need to be studied a lot, since some of them are really amazing.

Optical Illusions have been entertaining as well as amazing people for centuries.A very old one from the 17th Century,that's well over 300 years ago. It is an illustration by William Hogarth and is actualy quite sophisticated in that it encorporates over 20 mistakes or illusions.It appears on page 157 of this book,and shows up in just about any book that deals with Optical Illusions.An even older one ,a Topsy-Turvey portrait ,by by Italian artist Guiseppe Arcimboldo,on page 118,shows that even the great artists were creating Optical Illusions in the
16th Century.Artists of every genre have continued to produce better and more interesting Illusions ,particularly with the spread of photography.
Some illusions seem to be more difficult for some people than others.Probably,nobody produced a new and wider expansion of Illusions than the Duch Artist M.C.Escher,particularly with his Tesselations and Impossible Objects.His ideas have been the inspiration of many who are creating the "newer" illusions we are seeing today.
The author of this book is one of the most prolific authors in the Optical Illusion genre,having given us many books.
One of the things Seckel concentrates,along with showing Illusions from many artists and time periods;is to explain,to the greatest extent that scientists have been able to determine, just how the mind works to produce the illisions.
The art of Optical Illusions is continually expanding and if you are looking for a good book ,this would be an excellent choice of the many that are available

A great book to browse through and then read through. Of the many books on optical illusions, this one is the best.