Optical Illusion Dance ‘Strumpfhosentanz’ Is New Web Sensation, Plays Upon Cognitive Efforts To Match Arms And Limbs [VIDEOS]
When our eyes are confronted with strange visual information, our brain tries to fill in the gaps as best it can. But sometimes the brain gets it wrong — hilariously, mind-blowingly wrong.
A new video featured in the Huffington Post on Thursday shows a troupe of eight dancers, called the Renegade Roadhouse, all lined up in a row, joined by black and white suits that appear to have been sewn together. The patterning effect on the suits has the black side on one woman lined up with the black side on the woman beside her, and vice versa for the white sides.
But the real magic happens once the group starts dancing.
Known as a "Strumpfhosentanz," the dance involves each member moving their legs according to the person beside her. The effect is dizzying. When the line moves forward and back, the legs in black move in synchronicity with the legs in white. Each colored pair operates as a unit, leaving the viewer to watch a group of torsos move together while their legs dance in the spaces.
Even though we know the legs belong to each individual dancer, our brains see two black legs and two white legs pair together. So the illusion ends up being, what Scientific American recently called, "resilient to our best cognitive efforts to assign the correct arms and legs to each of the dancers."
"Our visual system insists in grouping adjacent body parts by color (and congruent motion)," it added.
Couple this function with our brain's tireless determination to convince us that what we see is real, and the illusion becomes all but concrete.
We find this rendition from 2011 slightly more convincing, however.