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Biotech Science

Monks See Through Optical Illusion Games 63

Posted by timothy from the use-your-illusion dept.
FhnuZoag writes "Nature is reporting that Buddhist monks, highly trained in meditation, were better able to maintain focus in a set of computer generated illusions designed to confuse the brain. The particular illusions involved showing different images to each eye, and maintaining a state of motion-induced blindness. This may be scientific proof of the efficacy of meditative study. The full, original article may be downloaded here. (500 KB PDF)"
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Monks See Through Optical Illusion Games More

Monks See Through Optical Illusion Games

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  • This is priceless... (Score:4, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @03:54PM (#12761087)

    From TFA:

    Alternatively, we can increase the duration of the disappearance by disrupting teh activity of the Right hemsiphere with precisely time pulses (the Right hemisphere seems to be much more picky about the prcise timing of teh TMS pulse thanthe Left, perhasp associated with the large blocks of time that the Left deals in ).

    What the hell? Who wrote this article, Jeff K.?

    d00d, this iz teh ghey.
  • I can't make the dots dissapear. Am I just doing this wrong?

    I stare at a frame of reference in the image. I've tried each dot, the center of the image, and the corners of the image.

    Since I'm definately not a monk, I'm sure that others must be experiencing this symptom as well.
    • Are you sure you're not a monk? I look at one dot, and the other two disappear within about 5 seconds. If I blink or jog my eyes at all they come back.

      You have to hold your head really really still.

      Perhaps monks, due to all their training, blink a lot?
    • Yes, you're doing it wrong. The article says the oober monk was able to maintain the bindness state for 12 minutes, and the average person for only 2 seconds. Since you can't even get them to disapear in the first place, you'd probably make a lousy monk.
      • Interestingly enough, I am able to hold the illusion in my left eye for a decent length of time, about half a minute. My right eye can only hold it for about one second, but the illusion reasserts itself rapidly (basically, the other dots flicker at about a one second cycle.) The end result when I am watching with both eyes is that the dots appear translucent. Eventually my vision decouples and I will see two triangles, with one triangle usually missing dots, and the other flickering.

        I wonder why this
        • Peripheral vision is based more on movement, and has more black and white receptors (rods) than the center (cones... for color). Hence, any images that are not moving much in the peripheral would get lost by the brain, and many shades of yellow tend to come out as black when converted to black and white anyway (like the background).

          The blind spots are interesting on their own... you can make your thumb disappear if you hold it our to your right. The blind spot in the middle of the eye is only at night, sin
          • I thought the blind spot in the middle was because that's where the veins come in that feed the retina. I remember hearing that as one piece of evidence against intelligent design, as it is perfectly explainable if you follow evolution of the eye, but if the eye was an "engineered" organ the veins/arteries would simply develop behind the retina.
    • Since I'm definately not a monk, I'm sure that others must be experiencing this symptom as well.

      You must be a PC gamer... Strong is the Force in you. I didn't have any problem at all keeping all three dots in my vision either when focusing on one of them. Is this some kind of joke?

      • I must have watched too much Star Trek, because I saw four lights.
      • the point is to not see the other two dots. the swirling blue dots makes your eyes move without you telling them to. the monks are able to focus on a single dot, causing the others disappear due to the blind spot in the human eye. they have greater control over the subconscious things their body does than you do. that is the point

        your eye is twitching around a lot. the monk can cause his eye to *not* twitch.

    • I can hold this for at least 10 seconds from what I've done so far... but then my eyes start to itch and i blink.
    • You're probably not focusing long enough. It's like those 3D pictures, it took me a minute to figure out the mental state required to make them disappear. Once I got that I can now make them disappear quickly and for as long as I like. Pretty cool.

      I wonder if this damanges anything though. After doing it for a couple minutes, when I stopped it was like someone had taken my picture with a flash or something. Even as I type this the visual residue is still there.
  • Buddhist meditation is a practice designed to help people stay grounded in the real world, instead of wrapped up in their thoughts, opinions, and other conditioned reactions to outside stimulus. For most people I know, their opinions are more real to them than the air they're breathing.
    • Funny, Buddhists hope for freedom from the "real" world and much of their meditative training is supposed to help break the perception of this real world.
    • Staying grounded in the real world is for earthworms. I like thinking. Try it some time.
      • With greater focus, I'd suspect these techniques could improve one's clarity of thought. My view has always been that Buddhism is more a religion of the intellect than of faith. I admire that.

        • Re:That's not surprising (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          My view has always been that Buddhism is more a religion of the intellect than of faith. I admire that.

          Yes, ignorant Westerners do tend to idolize Buddhism that way.

          Where is the "intellectual" side to the several Buddhist hells where the wicked are tormented eternally? Where is the "intellectual" side to the hungry ghosts? Where is the "intellectual" side to stories of the Buddha's miracles, which are suspiciously similar to the stories you presumably reject of Jesus' and Mohammed's?

          Where is the "inte

          • Where is the "intellectual" side to the several Buddhist hells where the wicked are tormented eternally? Where is the "intellectual" side to the hungry ghosts?

            These are what Buddhist teachers call "skillful means".

            They are not core Buddhist teachings, they are shiny candy coatings (and you will find noted Buddhist teachers, especially in the Zen traditions, who explictly confirm this) introduced in the Mahayana traditions to help ignorant and superstitious people swallow the "medicine" of Buddhist

          • When I say intellectual, I'm going back before the myths, which I reject, to the practical application of the ideas.

            I don't believe any chanting or praying will earn some sort of salvation. But I do believe that Buddhism teaches salvation and happiness come from within. I find that to be psychologically sound.
          • Yes, ignorant Westerners do tend to idolize Buddhism that way.

            Where is the "intellectual" side to the several Buddhist hells where the wicked are tormented eternally? Where is the "intellectual" side to the hungry ghosts? Where is the "intellectual" side to stories of the Buddha's miracles, which are suspiciously similar to the stories you presumably reject of Jesus' and Mohammed's?

            Where is the "intellectual" side to a religion that, in its most popular form in Japan, states that it doesn't matter what
    • You think that's air they're breathing?
  • I tried the illusion they referenced at http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/bonneh.html [uq.edu.au] and my "self reported" results were on par with the monks. If I blink, I lose the focus and see the other 2 dots, but I can stave off the other two as long as I can hold off blinking. Anyone else?

  • efficacy (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by epine ( 68316 )

    I thought "efficacy" was related to the root "effective", but apparently it's a sibling to Papacy.

  • Zen is denial? (Score:3, Funny)

    by bsdbigot ( 186157 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @04:16PM (#12761362) Journal
    Student: Why are the bars horizontal on the left and vertical on the right?
    Master: One eye sees truth, one eye sees falsehood.
    Student: Which eye is correct?
    Master: Neither.
  • That's what I read, anyway. I was rather looking forward to it.

  • How do they know what the monks saw? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Momoru ( 837801 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @04:36PM (#12761591) Homepage Journal
    I think the monks were just lying, dirty lying monks.

  • Meditating (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dharma's Dad ( 668471 )
    I have had some success meditating, of the school where one trys to clear the mind of thoughts. Looking at the dot animation, trying to "keep the mind quiet" and not re-resolve the yellow dots feels very similar to trying to get the mind to "not think" (although it is easier with the animation, since there is something to "entertain" the mind [the blue dots]).

    The way it was explained to me, the mind is afraid it will cease to exist if it is not involved in constant thought or self-conversation.

    Meditation

    • I accomplish the same thing by getting some ambient or classical music and playing it on my computer while staring directly at a full-screen G-Force visualization. I think it may be a self-induced state of hypnosis.

  • Thinking changes perception? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by crmartin ( 98227 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:37PM (#12762172)
    This is interesting.

    I've been doing Buddhist practices for damn near 40 years now, and I've noticed it anecdotally: a lot of visual illusions don't seem to work any longer. Now, it's hard to separate that out from being, well, old (remember how as a kid it looked for all the world like the moon was racing along with your car when Mom and Dad drove you somewhere at night?) and perceptual psych is way down the list of things I want to do in my spare time, but it seems completely plausible to me that monks who spend lots more time in these practices than I do would show these effects very strongly.

    Exceeding focus of thought is required to write a sentence like that one, I hope you know.
    • There is a difference in this one... the trained monks are better able to maintain the illusion. Might have to do with the mind's ability to tune out that which is not important. In this case, since the dots are not important, they get tuned out.
  • My knowledge of Buddhism [wku.edu] can be summarized as the contents of a rather comic TV series and the book from which it comes ("Journey to West"). Tripitaka, the monk in the series, was decieved by numerous illusions, but the primary character (Monkey, "Great Sage and Equal of Heaven") routinely used all sorts of cunning, trickery and a pink cloud to resolve all such issues.

    I am unsure as to why meditation, per se, would help at all with optical illusions. TM alters the brain chemistry, to a degree, but in ways

    • Re:Journey to West (Score:3, Insightful)

      by crmartin ( 98227 )
      The Journey to the West is hilarious, you should get the whole thing sometime.

      Anyway, it's not that Buddhists distrust the sense themseves: they distrust thoughts about the senses. Those thoughts then can modify the way you perceive the sensory data --- consider watching someone eat, with evident enjoyment, a dark brown semi-liquid substance with a spoon. Your perception of it, down to visceral reactions, is wildly different if you think it's chocolate ice cream or dog poop.
      • It's a four-book volume, in the most complete form. From the sounds of it, there's a lot of cultural in-jokes and references, which I'll likely miss, but I've ordered the set anyway.

  • efficacy? (Score:3)

    by cahiha ( 873942 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @06:01PM (#12762457)
    It's unclear that defeating optical illusions is a good thing. Many optical illusions are just part of the normal functioning of the visual system. In some cases, optical illusions directly aid in the perception of the real world, in other cases, they may not have a function, but are an indication that other processes are working as they should. A completely "literal" (metric, whatever) interpretation is generally not useful, even if you could achieve it.
  • Did anybody else notice that the page title is "404 Not Found" ?
    After opening the page in a background tab (Firefox), I glanced to see it reporting 404. Dang, I thought, /.ed already. Moving to the page to close it, I saw it was there. I checked their tags

    (title)404 Not Found(/title)

  • I can maintain the illusion - or the lack of illusion - as long as I want.

    So am I a zen master yet? (-;

    Now seriously, try this kind of test as part of a videogame and see how good gaming geeks do. Especially if they don't know which part of the game is testing them!

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