Before you ask, yes… this picture, by Rob at the What Is It? Blog, is Photoshopped; that’s not the illusion here. Instead, it’s the fact that the man on the right, the one that looks so gigantic, is the exact copy of man on the far left. So why does he look so much bigger than the original one, you might ask? Simply because the lines mess with our brain’s perception of size.
If you think this picture somehow looks familiar, sans the illusion part, you’re probably right. It’s actually a famous picture of bridge painters hanging from the wires of the Brooklyn Bridge near the end of the construction phase. You can even see the skyline of Lower Manhattan in the background – can you imagine how different that skyline must look these days? Those of you who live in New York know exactly how true that is.
