Spinning Woman Illusion

Spinning Silhouett Illusion

At first glance the spin­ning girl’s sil­hou­ette above appears to be rotat­ing clock­wise, but if you check the shadow below her you can see the direc­tion reverse. Once the spin­ning direc­tion changes in your mind, she will be spin­ning counter-clockwise. Ini­tially it seems hard, but stare long enough and it can be done.

Spin­ning Sihou­ette Opti­cal Illu­sion — Mighty Opti­cal Illusions

Update: Accord­ing to the Her­ald Sun, if you see the woman spin­ning clock­wise, then you are right-brained. If she appears to be spin­ning left, then you are left brained.

10 Responses to “Spinning Woman Illusion”


  • This is MY theory:

    It’s just a shadow. You can’t really tell if the image is fac­ing for­ward or back­ward, but since we are used to peo­ple look­ing at us, our first impres­sion is that the dancer is look­ing at us. The dancer’s leg is mov­ing left, stops, right, stops etc. If on the split-second your eyes saw the image, the dancer’s leg was mov­ing left — you would think that she was spin­ning clock­wise. If it was mov­ing right — you would think that she was spin­ning counter-clockwise. From that point, your brain had already decided which direc­tion the dancer was spin­ning and it would be very dif­fi­cult to change your mind with­out look­ing away. It is about the exact split-second your eyes first saw the image.

    How’s my theory?

  • When you first see the woman spin­ning clock­wise this should work for you like it works for me. If you look at the shadow of the woman’s foot when it is at the left and blink your eyes she will change from spin­ning clock­wise to counter-clockwise. Once she begins to spin counter-clockwise look at her foot and blink again and it should change direc­tion back to clock­wise. I have char­ac­ter­is­tics of both right and left brained so I am not quite sure which one I am.

  • This is a more star­tling illu­sion than the
    hybrid image exam­ple at MIT at least the Einstein-Monroe one is explained by the super­im­posed image but this is a much more vivid one because of the AHA moment when the spin changes and then changes again as you look up from the foot area.

    It is not as impor­tant for me to know why the human brain does this, as it is to under­stand that we have this gray mat­ter wob­bling inside our heads that we don’t really under­stand (and neu­ro­sci­en­tists are at the fron­tiers of dis­cov­ery about this as well) and so being more thought­ful about what lights up neural path­ways, what activ­i­ties help us to improve our intel­li­gence and this aware­ness that there is some many lay­ers to things and how we as human beings exist in this tiny vis­i­ble spec­trum, this blip of time and how that under­stand­ing help us to uplift our think­ing to trans­for­ma­tional wis­dom rather than sub­merge in the inputs to our mind in a chaotic manner.

    So my take­away here is that just when you think you know what the IS is, some­times the IS isn’t — and I rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ence here between how I per­ceive “What Is” and e.g. how Bill Clin­ton once ques­tioned what “is” is.

    M.

  • [quote com­ment=””]Kramer auto Pingback[…] says: http://www.seanbuckley.ca/blog/2007/07/14/spinning-woman-illusion/ hacker says: u kojem smjeru se vrti? Julezz says: ouu maj gaad jel to nesto sta buljis i […][/quote]

    The questoin isent what way do you see it spinning?…its what way is it really spinning?

  • Wow It’s intrest­ing , I can see both clock­wise and counter-clockwise with­out wink­ing or look­ing at the shadow , you just have to con­cen­trate a lit­tle bit. Am I cen­ter brained !!!!?

  • Yea…I never saw her spin­ning clock­wise. At all. I’ve seen this about 5 times in total, and she’s still spin­ning counter-clockwise. I look at the shadow, blink, and still noth­ing. =[ Bah. Oh well.

  • if you put your fin­ger on her toe and you go right and left then with me i can just make her go right left right left by putting my fin­ger on her toe­and going right left right left.

  • The form does twirling .…left , right, shift­ing… I’ll stop before she colors.…..;)

  • gracious…i reckon

  • Why does she spin faster when you just look at her head!!! If you scroll so just her head is vis­able she spins super fast!!!

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