These mental litmus tests will melt your mind.
Puzzle lovers are straining their brains trying to solve a trio of baffling optical illusions, which reportedly reveal how the viewer’s mind works. A video detailing the trippy neurological tests currently boasts a whopping 4.6 million views on TikTok.
“THREE ILLUSIONS — can you solve all of them?” reads the caption to the now-viral clip, which was posted by popular TikTokker Max Klymenko to his more than 2.5 million followers.
The first demonstration starts off typically enough with the image wizard rolling a dumbbell-shaped object down a downward sloped ramp. However, the display takes a seemingly physics-defying turn after he puts a conical item at the base of the same slope, whereupon it impossibly travels up the incline as if propelled by an invisible motor.
“How did I beat gravity?” Klymenko challenges in the video.
[Warning: Spoilers Below]
In the second challenge, the influencer can be seen trying to grab a tiny pig statue standing atop a silver circle. However, each time he tries to grab the pig-urine, his fingers slip through as if it’s a hologram.
It’s later revealed that the swine statuette is actually located beneath the reflective surface.
The last illusion involve two curved quadrilateral objects — one red and one yellow — that are the same size when stacked atop each other. When placed side-by-side, the yellow one seems to dwarf its crimson counterpart.
Klymenko didn’t provide any hints on how to solve the disorienting brain teasers, although he did note in the comments that “he first one and last one are the hardest to get.”
Needless to say, the trippy trifecta had many users wondering if they were on ‘Shrooms one stumped puzzler writing, “Early… and I’m tripping.”
“You didn’t beat the gravity you just beat my brain,” wrote another.
However, others were able to pull off the visual hat trick.
One astute user correctly observed that the illusions were caused respectively by “center of gravity,” a “concave elliptical mirror,” and a discrepancy between the inner and outer edges of the the objects.
Specifically, the gravity trick is caused by the respective shapes of both the cone and the ramp, according to the physics department at the UC Santa Barbara, California. “The V-shaped ramp is made so that its vertex lies lower than its wide end, so that the downhill direction is from the wide end to the vertex,” they write. “If you place the double cone at the low end of the ramp, where it rests on the rails near its center, its center of mass and its gravitational potential energy are higher than they are when the cone is at the high end of the ramp. The double cone thus rolls along the ramp in the uphill direction.”
Meanwhile, the “teleporting pig” effect is caused by a concave mirror, which projects images to different locations.
The geometric head trip is called a Jastrow illusion, which is when the mind is fooled by positioning of the shapes’ edges. “The fact that the shorter side of one figure is next to the longer side of the other somehow tricks the brain into perceiving one shape as longer and the other as shorter, although it is unclear exactly why this is so,” The New World Encyclopedia explains.
Not challenging enough for your elite brain? Check out these 20 mind-blowing optical illusions, ranging from the mother of all animal safaris to an image that turns people colorblind.