Here’s a fun little distraction to make your brain freak. This one is a little more interactive than the other illusions in this article. Looking at it as it is will not be very entertaining, but if you put a tiny little work into it you’ll see what we’re talking about.
Assuming you’re viewing this image from your phone, shake it up a bit. When you’re done shaking the device, look at the Oreo cookie in the center of the cake and watch it dance! The jiggling effect sort of turns the cake into Jell-O. It’s like the cookie is still shimmying and shaking even after you’ve stopped moving the phone.
Partly Cloudy
We have all done this before — stared up at the sky and tried to make familiar shapes out of cloud blobs. Boy, how we miss that kind of free time! In some cases, we would have to really strain our brains to see something other than a shapeless mass of cotton candy, and in other cases, the shape would reveal itself quite easily.
This is what happens when your cloud storage gets overwhelmed with too many pet photos. A big cloud comes over your house and rains cats and dogs. But seriously, it’s quite a cloud form. When does a puffy cloud appear to be cat-shaped and dog-shaped at once? Probably never.
A Lakeside Mirage
Although it looks like a nice strip of white sandy beach at the base of rolling green hills, don’t bother pulling over to take a dip. Tell your brain that the green sea that spreads out before you is not real. Insist it is just an optical illusion.
Look at it again and try to visualize, instead, a concrete barrier on the side of a highway what it is. The shrubs obscure the concrete barrier, and the shadow on the side of the wall appears to be a lake, while the sunshine on the top of the wall looks like a long strip of beach.
What Kind of Swimming Pool Is This?
Why do the people inside look totally dry? And how does that man’s hat stay on? Shouldn’t their hair be floating upward? Do we see someone using their phone? Mystery solved! This swimming pool is actually a very special pool that contains no water.
It’s an art installation at the 21st Century of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. There is a hallway and a door to enter the pool from the bottom, while a glass plate covers the surface of the pool with a foot of water on top, giving the impression of a filled pool. Now all they need is a pretend swimmer at the top.
An Impossible Repair Job
A clever Reddit user captured this scene at just the right angle to drive us bonkers. It looks like these repairmen are defying the laws of physics by reaching across to this side of the bridge from the distance of the street, where their lift vehicle is parked. How could their lift stretch so far?
Well, for starters, their lift has horizontal motion as well as vertical. So, the reality is those workers are repairing the bridge from where their vehicle is parked. As a bonus optical illusion, check out that orange safety cone that seems to levitate above the worker on the ground.