How It Works

These ambiguous images take advantage of the fact that our brains make very rough approximations of what we see: input from tens thousands of photoreceptors is funneled into a few thousand of ganglion cells, dozens of V1 cells, and end up contributing to a handful of neurons that fire with regards to recognizing a particular complex object (such as a duck or rabbit). Depending on orientation or the center of our focus, entirely different photoreceptors and ganglion cells fire, resulting in interesting twists to what we see.

In Our World