But it is different when we come, for instance, to those illusions in
which movement is forced on our perception by contrast and aftereffect.
We look from a bridge into the flowing water and if we turn our eyes
toward the land the motionless shore seems to swim in the opposite
direction. It is not sufficient in such cases to refer to contrasting
eye movements. It can easily be shown by experiments that these
movements and counter-movements in the field of vision can proceed in
opposite directions at the same time and no eye, of course, is able to
move upward and downward, or right and left, in the same moment. A very
characteristic experiment can be performed with a black spiral line on a
white disk. If we revolve such a disk slowly around its center, the
spiral line produces the impression of a continuous enlargement of
concentric curves. The lines start at the center and expand until they
disappear in the periphery. If we look for a minute or two into this
play of the expanding curves and then turn our eyes to the face of a
neighbor, we see at once how the features of the face begin to shrink.
It looks as if the whole face were elastically drawn toward its center.
If we revolve the disk in the opposite direction, the curves seem to
move from the edge of the disk toward the center, becoming smaller and
smaller, and if then we look toward a face, the person seems to swell up
and every point in the face seems to move from the nose toward the chin
or forehead or ears. Our eye which watches such an aftereffect cannot
really move at the same time from the center of the face toward both
ears and the hair and the chin. The impression of movement must
therefore have other conditions than the actual performance of the
movements, and above all it is clear from such tests that the seeing of
the movements is a unique experience which can be entirely independent
from the actual seeing of successive positions. The eye itself gets the
impression of a face at rest, and yet we see the face in the one case
shrinking, in the other case swelling; in the one case every point
apparently moving toward the center, in the other case apparently moving
away from the center. The experience of movement is here evidently
produced by the spectator's mind and not excited from without.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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