Which Way Do You Spin… Left Brain or Right Brain?

View Comments (426)

• Just imagine that her left leg is actually her right, and she will begin spinning the other way. I saw Clockwise originally, and made myself see counter-clockwise with effort.

• Weird. At first she was spinning clockwise for me, now she is spinning anti-clockwise and I can't see how she was spinning clockwise in the first place.. :S

• I can see her doing whatever I want! Yes. I can make her go clockwise and counter clockwise... Cool. Last time I tried this (couple of years ago) I only saw her moving counter clockwise.
  This years I've been working on to become more creative...

  However, I know I'm mostly left-brained...

• I'm not convinced that the animation doesn't switch just to mess with people, but apparently I am right-brained, for the most part. The page load delay causes the picture to turn one way then another, leading to my skepticism about whether it is actually a "mind" perception or just a fancy hoax. Either way, it's interesting and spreading around the web like wildfire.

• Whoa, is that cool. I see her spinning both ways, too, first clockwise then counterclockwise. Does that mean I'm schizophrenic? And wherever did you find that graphic?

• This is clearly a silhouette of a 3D model of a woman spinning clockwise (from a top-down perspective). All you have to do is measure the lengths of the legs and arms at different points in the animation to prove this. The shadow of her feet also proves this (notice how the shadow of her foot is moving to the left, and appears *below* her other spinning foot (meaning that it's in the air and is closer to you, not further away).

  Nonetheless, for what it's worth, I can trick my brain at will into thinking she's spinning either right or left. The way I do it is by focusing on her foot's shadow and thinking right or left, then looking up.

• Hmmm. I see her turning clockwise -- how does she go counter? I don't see it.

• I particularly like this quote taken from the essay on poetic meter titled, "The Neural Lyre,"

  There are strong logical objections to the popular and prevailing view that the right brain is emotional while the left brain is rational, and that artistic capacities, being emotional, are located in the right brain. Both sides of the brain are capable of rational calculation: it is surely just as rational to "see" a geometric proof-which is the function of the right brain-as to analyze a logical proposition-which would be done on the left. And both sides of the brain respond to the presence of brain chemicals, and thus both must be said to be "emotional" in this crude sense. The right brain may be better able to recognize and report emotions, but this capacity is surely a cognitive one in itself, and does not necessarily imply a judgment about whether it feels emotions more or less than the left. Above all, art is quite as much a rational activity as it is an emotional one: so the location of art on the "emotional" right is surely the result of a misunderstanding of the nature of art. More plausible is the position of Jerre Levy, who characterizes the relationship between right and left as a complementarity of cognitive capacities5. She has stated in a brilliant aphorism that the left brain maps spatial information into a temporal order, while the right brain maps temporal information onto a spatial order. In a sense understanding largely consists in the translation of information to and fro between a temporal ordering and a spatial one-resulting in a sort of stereoscopic depth-cognition. In Levy's view, the two "brains" alternate in the treatment of information, according to a rhythm determined by the general brain state, and pass, each time, their accumulated findings on to each other. The fact that experienced musicians use their left brain just as much as their right in listening to music shows that their higher understanding of music is the result of the collaboration of both "brains," the music having been translated first from temporal sequence to spatial pattern, and then "read," as it were, back into a temporal movement. The neurobiologist Gunther Baumgartner suggests that the forebrain acts as the integrating agent between specialized left and right functions, and it is in this integrative process that we would locate the essentially creative capacities of the brain, whether artistic or scientific. The apparent superiority of the isolated right brain in emotional matters may well reflect simply the fact that emotions, like music, are temporal in nature and their articulation requires the sort of temporal-on-spatial mapping that is the specialty of the right.

  Read more of it here:

  http://www.cosmoetica.com/B22-FT2.htm

  - Jeff

• Left-handed and (so I thought) right brained but no amount of staring will make her go clockwise =(

• If you're having trouble switching the rotation in your head, here's a trick.

  Follow her extended leg until it goes to one side. Imagine that she hits a glass wall and bounces in the opposite direction. Making your eyes/brain expect this change will force the effect. It works best if you move your eyes just ahead of the foot.

  Do it again on the other side.

  Soon, you'll have something of a metronome effect with your dancer.