Looking, but not seeing.

I'm starting to see some kind of a correlation between Looking isn't Seeing and the Fairey concept. Can't put it into words yet.

Talk about optical illusions. These are excerpts from Scientific American's "Illusions: Colors Out of Space"
Deals with the neuroscience behind visual illusions.

Eye shadow. This Japanese manga girl by Kitaoka looks like she has one blue eye and one gray eye. In fact, both eyes are exactly the same shade of gray. The girl's right eye only looks the same as the turquoise hair clip because of the reddish context. Part of the process of seeing color is that three different kinds of photoreceptors in the eye are tuned to three overlapping families of color: red, green and blue (which are activated by visible light of long, medium and short wavelengths). These signals are then instantaneously compared with signals from nearby regions in the same scene. As the signals are passed along to higher and higher processing centers in the brain, they continue to be compared with larger and larger swaths of the surrounding scene. This "opponent process," as scientists call it, means that color and brightness are always relative.


Red rings.This image by Kitaoka contains a number of blue-green circular structures. The red rings are purely a creation of your brain.


Fickle hearts. All the hearts in this checkerboard are made out of the same cyan-colored dots, but they look green against the green background and blue against the blue background. The image, by Kitaoka, is based on the dungeon illusion discovered by vision scientist Paola Bressan of the University of Padua in Italy.



Illusion of the year. The logo for the Best Illusion of the Year Contest is a combination of White's effect (the vase appears to be different colors behind the two curtains) and the famous face-vase illusion (in which the "vase" is a trophy for the winner).


Picasso's blue period. Margaret S. Livingstone of Harvard Medical School has shown that although Picasso used blue, he was careful to maintain the luminance relations—contrasts in lighting within the scene. Those luminance relations, which we use to make sense of the image, are apparent in a grayscale version of the painting (right). This is why color-blind people see just fine in almost every way—sometimes they do not even know they have a deficit.

http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/