to see or not to see?

so i stumbled upon this woman's work and was immedialtely enthralled. i guess i miss MIT or i have a soft spot for cute researchers on the cutting edge of neuroscience. anyway, i'm going to simulate one of her neatest tricks.

1. open this pdf file
2. go to page 5 (to see neutral woman and angry man images)
3. view the images at 100% zoom
4. zoom out in steps all the way to, say, 10% or even lower

the images gradually change from one to the other!

why? well you can read the paper to find out. basically they are hybrid images combining the two sets of information (angry man and neutral woman), one set filtered to contain only "low spatial frequencies in Fourier space" and the other set filtered to contain only high spatial frequencies. (in layman's terms, it's blurry or sharp.) anyway, staring at close range, high frequency or sharp features are more noticeable, masking any information encoded in the large scale, whereas once you move far away sharp features are less dominant allowing the low frequency information to be drawn out, perceived, if you will. it's sort of the same principle as squinting to see a pixelated picture better.

recently a neurobiologist at Harvard Med noticed those underlying mechanisms at work in the mona lisa painting. whereas art historians and the like (cue marc's eye roll of phycisist's condescension) argue back and forth about mona lisa's enigmatic smile, said scientist proved that mona lisa is both smiling and not smiling at the same time , albeit at different spatial frequencies because of some clever shading at the corners of the mouth. she predicted this by looking directly and indirectly at the painting, then proved it by taking low and high pass filters of the image. ha! of course it would take a scientist to resolve an art "mystery."