(Entertainment-NewsWire.com, June 10, 2013 ) Orlando, FL -- In the hollow mask illusion, viewers perceive an image such as the back side of a hollow mask as a normal convex (pointing outward) face. The illusion exploits our brain’s strategy for making sense of the visual world by uniting what it actually sees, known as bottom-up processing, with what it expects to see based on prior experience, known as top-down processing.
This powerful expectation overrides visual cues, like shadows and depth information, that indicate anything to the contrary.
In healthy viewers, the illusion is so powerful that even when aware of the illusion, they are still unable to see the concave face because the mind just flips it back. The illusion is at its strongest when used with a face, because it doesn’t work well with other objects or even upside down faces. Experts believe this bias is due to the special relationship humans have with faces.
But for patients with schizophrenia, they aren’t fooled by the image. They can see the hollow face for what it is - concave and inside out. About seven out of 1,000 Americans suffer from the schizophrenia, which is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and poor planning.
Some psychologists believe this dissociation from reality may result from an imbalance between the previously discussed bottom-up and top-down processing, a hypothesis ripe for testing for schizophrenia using the hollow mask illusion.
About Drew Thomas Deconstructing Magic
Drew Thomas (http://www.drewthomasmagic.com/) is a corporate magician and a rare creative and extraordinary talent practicing a unique and original school of illusion. By using ordinary objects everyone can relate to, he changes our preconceptions towards “magic”. No smoke, mirrors, or exotic animals. Instead, Drew relies on his arsenal of spray paint, metal, gears, wood, and power tools. He’s created themed shows for Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights, Six Flags and Seaworld, accounting for 500 performances annually for nearly a decade. See some of Drew’s magic videos and experience the magic.
