Sometimes You Have to Step Back to See the Big Picture

Take a look at the image below. What do you see?


If you're sitting at the typical distance from your computer monitor, you likely saw a migraine inducing set of vertical black and white lines. But, maybe you also saw something else in those lines. Some pattern, some design, that you just cannot make out clearly. And you likely have increased that headache another notch or two, eh?

Look at it again and move your head slowly from side to side. Ahhhh, you were right! There is something there. You might even be able to recognize the shape, but you still do not see it very clearly, do you?

This next part takes a little bit of work, and a little bit faith. Get up from that comfortable chair and take a few steps back. Be careful, watch for obstacles, and don't trip.

Ahhhhhhhh ... You see it now. Jesus was the design, the pattern, behind that dizzying array of black and white. There is order to the seeming chaos of what you saw. There is a reason, a purpose, to the ways things were laid out. It wasn't until you allowed yourself to step back from the close comfort of your usual space that things became clearer.

Some will understand the subtle message in my prose. Others just want the "whys and hows" of the illusion I've shown you. You others keep reading to find out. You some, too, if interested. ~.^

The optical illusion above works very similar to the Dr. Angry & Mr. Smile optical illusion I showed yesterday. It uses a set of coarse and fine features in a hybrid image to trick your eyes into seeing one thing or the other.

Up close, your eyes are hard pressed to differentiate the varied shadings and finer lines that make up the embedded image of Jesus. Too, the stark black and white of the lines, and their closeness, produce another effect upon your eyes, further confusing your brain (perception) as to what it is seeing. When you step back, you begin to see those fine features as your eyes and brain start to fill in those areas making a coarser image.

It is a similar effect if you decreased an image's size in a paint program. You lose the finer details as the coarser ones become more prominent and the algorithms try to replicate things with the same sized pixels in a smaller area. If you right click and save the optical illusion above and open it in a paint program, you can test this out yourself. Just decrease the image size incrementally and you will see Jesus' image appear as the image itself grows smaller.

As in life, this optical illusion shows us that sometimes you have to step back to see the big picture.

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