 The Brain / Museum / Illusions / Interpretive / Impossible Triangle |
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The sculpture you see looks like an equilateral triangle, but only if you look at it from a certain angle. The minute you move sideways a bit, you'll see that's only an illusion. The original illusion of the imaginary triangle is a two-dimensional drawing that our brain interprets, according to its past experience, as three-dimensional. The picture appears logical to us because the brain focuses alternately on different areas, each one of which is logical. All of them together, however, create an illogical situation. This illusion, like the Endless Staircase, is connected with the mathematician Roger Shepard and the well-known artist M.C. Escher, whose pictures contain illusions and impossible objects. In 1954, Penrose's imagination was sparked upon hearing a lecture by Escher at a mathematical conference, and he proceeded to "invent" the imaginary triangle. Escher later incorporated the triangle in his famous lithograph, Waterfall. Ever since then, the figure has been called the "Penrose Triangle," even though it was first drawn 20 years earlier by a Swedish artist, Oscar Reutersvärd. The two illusions are evidence of the disassociation between local and global perceptive processes in the brain. Yet researchers do not yet agree on how these two types of perception work together. Links: Related exhibit:
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The Impossible Triangle
