Creepy video optical illusion changes the way you see people’s FACES – and freaked out viewers say it is ‘terrifying’
THIS creepy video optical illusion distorts the way you see people’s faces – leaving viewers both baffled and terrified.
The new video optical illusion asks you to stare at a cross before flashing numerous faces on the screen.
You’ll have to watch the video to take part in this latest optical illusion.
In the clip, pairs of different faces are flashed quickly in a sequence.
There is purposely empty space between the two to faces for the illusion to work.
Viewers are told to keep their eyes on the cross if they want to see the faces change.
The video assures you that the faces have not already been altered – it is just your brain doing that for you.
Unknowingly, your mind changes the faces in scary ways, so some people could have eyes in the wrong place, for example.
The altered perception is a result of what’s called the “flash-faced distortion effect” by the National Library of Medicine.
This is a “striking visual illusion in which faces presented sequentially in peripheral vision begin to look increasingly grotesque after just a few faces have been presented.”
Cognitive experts can’t even fully explain the distortion effect – but it could derive from the way our vision normalises the features of a face so the one that follows becomes abnormal to us.
Users took to the comments of the video to express their confusion and horror at the illusion.
One said: “It starts of hilarious and then slowly becomes terrifying.”
Another commented that it would “undoubtedly dominate my nightmares for the next week or so.”
And: “That was so cool. Saw a bunch of grotesque faces with multiple eyes. Even lizard looking things.”
Someone also pointed out that the face remains “grotesque” even when you pause the video until viewers “finally move” their eyes.
The distortion effect is similar to “demon face syndrome”, where a Tennessee man is one of 75 people in the world recorded with the condition.
Victor Sharrah has dealt with an extremely rare condition where every person has seemed to have a warped and disturbing-looking face.
Sharrah said his nightmare began when he woke up one morning, three years ago, and he saw a devil-looking person in his home.
This person turned out to be his roommate and the confusion continued when he stepped outside and each person looked the same.
Sharrah was 56 years old at the time and revealed he has still experienced the effects of his condition three years on.
This condition is called prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) and it affects the way people see the shape, size, colour, and position of facial features.
The outcome varies from person to person but some common aspects are drooped, stretched, or larger and smaller features.
What causes prosopometamorphopsia?
Face processing depends on a complex network of brain regions, and dysfunction within this network can produce a wide variety of face processing impairments.
When faces or parts of faces are perceived as distorted, the condition is known as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO).
Around 75 cases reports on people with PMO have been published.
There isn’t much understanding about why people experience different types of PMO.
Full-face PMO and hemi-prosopometamorphopsia PMO are two most prominent subtypes of PMO.
In full face PMO, features on both sides of the face are distorted.
For hemi-PMO, features on one side of the face are distorted while features on the other side of the face look normal.
Source: Understanding PMO