You've probably never seen this image before but it is one of the most famous in the world.
Lenna, as this picture is called, was taken from a 1973 issue of Playboy, Alexander Sawchuck was an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute and he was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper.
They got tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s.
They wanted something glossy to ensure good dynamic input range and they wanted a human face.
Just then somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy.
The scan he took of this image became one of the most used images in computer history.
The image has appeared in dozens of scientific journals articles and in the MIT Technology Review it was described as clearly one of the most important events in electric imaging history.
It's a great image for processing and scanning because of its detail, flat regions, shading and texture and of course the fact that the picture is of a beautiful woman but doesn't hurt.
And so we can thank Lenna for photoshop, a program many of us use everyday.
When you look at this image closely in photoshop you see, well, what all images are up close.
Squares.
Millions of slightly differently colored squares.
What looks like shading from afar is actually thousands of images each colored slightly different from the last.
Now we call these squares pixels and the more pixels the higher the quality, the higher the definition the image is. Yet.
When we look around with our eyes we don't see pixels, we can't just like zoom in on a thing and see the tiny little squares.
The closest approximation are atoms.
So if objects in real life don't have a visual pixelation, bananas don't come in high definition or standard definition for example, what is the resolution of the human eye?
The higher the resolution on a camera the more pixels it picks up and our eyes are cameras, we have a good 52 megapixels.
Yeah it's a pretty good camera we got in our head.
Two of them actually but it's not necessarily how many pixels the eye takes and they eye isn't a camera there's something else in the mix, the thing which processes the images which are seen.
The brain and the brain can be tricked.
Studies have shown that you actually think you're better looking than you actually are, including one by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Erin Whitechurch of the University of Virginia.
The researchers took pictures of study participants and using a computerized procedure produced more attractive and less attractive versions of those pictures.
Participants were told that they would be presented with a series of images including the original picture and images modified from that picture.
They were then asked to identify the unmodified picture.
They tended to select an attractively modified picture of themselves.
Now eyes and brains that love familiarity and you probably see yourself every day in the mirror so the eyes and your brain, they begin to like what they see.
Your brain can trick your eyes into seeing things that aren't actually there but it also works the other way your eyes can trick your brain into seeing things that aren't actually there.
For example pareidoila.
Ever seen a face in something that wasn't the face?
A potato chip? Surface of Mars?
That's pareidoila, a psychological phenomenon where we see human faces and things that well aren't human faces.
But what about another trick of the eye seeing things that aren't there.
Like ghosts.
Here is an interesting fact; if humans are exposed to a low enough frequency that you can't hear it but you can feel it weird things happen.
It wrecks havoc with your emotions.
In one experiment scientists snuck in low frequency sounds a live concert, at the end of the experiment approximately twenty-two percent of the people involved in the experiment reported feelings of unexplainable dread chills and depression when infrasound was blasted into the crowd and now we enter Vic Tandy and we may have an explanation for any strange apparitions you may have seen.
You see Vic Tandy was a researcher working in an engineering department in a lab.
Where Tandy worked cleaning staff as well as fellow researchers complained of feeling dread, depression and a strange feeling that someone was watching them.
Every so often staff would say they saw a dark figure out of the corner of their eyes.
I'm getting chills, let me read you this extract.
That is until Vic Tandy was working on his own one night after everyone else had left.
As he sat at the desk writing it began to feel increasingly uncomfortable.
He was sweating but cold the cats were moving around and the groans and creaks from what was now a deserted factory were spooky, but there is also something else.
It was as though something was in the room with Vic.
There was no way into the lab without walking past the desk where Vic was working.
He looked around and even checked the gas bottles to be sure there was not a leak in the room.
There were oxygen and carbon dioxide bottles and occasionally the staff would work with anesthetic agents, all of which caused all sorts of problems if handled inappropriately.
All of these checked out fine so Vic went to get a cup of coffee and returned to the desk.
As he was writing he became aware that he was being watched, and a figure slowly emerged to his left.
It was indistinct and on the periphery of this vision but it moved as Vic would expect a person to.
The apparition was grey and made no sound.
The hair was standing up on Vic's neck and there was a distinct chill in the room.
As Vic recalls "It would not have been unreasonable to suggest I was terrified".
Vic was unable to see any detail and finally built up the courage to turn and face the thing.
As he turned the apparition faded and disappeared.
After eliminating gas poisoning and rogue equipment, Vic realized that the ghostly apparitions would always occur in a certain section of the lab.
He also realized that if he put a metal sheet in a vice it would start to vibrate uncontrollably for no reason, as though a ghost was playing with it.
Or it was vibrations.
Specifically a silent exhaust fan was sending out low-frequency vibrations that bounced back and forth on the labs walls until they formed a powerful wave at 18.9Hz.
Right at the panic range.
According to a NASA study it was powerful enough to resonate with the average human eyeball causing smeared vision.
This is a phenomenon where the eye vibrates just enough to register something static, say a speck of dust on your glasses, as large moving shapes.
Once the fan was removed surprise, surprise the ghosts disappeared.
Vic Tamdy then went on to test this explanation at a local haunted house.
According to the locals as soon as someone would step into the cellar they would freeze up seeing strange grey ghosts and having to leave because of nausea.
Vic discovered that the shape of the celler, the hallway leading to it as well as nearby factories all contributed in making the haunted celler a perfect resonating chamber.
The vibrations created where exactly 18.9Hz and where most powerful at the threshold of the cellar where most people became sick and terrified.
There you have it, pixels, vibrating eyeballs, and ghosts just another friday night at the watering hole or as what I like to call dinner at my house.
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