To put together the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest requires the proverbial village. In the thirteen contests so far, literally hundreds of people have helped make the event a success, first and foremost, the illusion creators—the incredibly observant and ingenious discoverers of unusual misperceptions who participate year after year in the contest. Without them, there would be no competition.
This book features the top ten illusions for each year of the first decade of the contest, and you can see the top ten finalists of subsequent editions on the contest’s website, which is updated yearly. But for every illusion that you enjoy in the website archive, there were countless others that never saw the light of day. Many of these creations—even though they were not selected to compete among the top ten—were also wonderful. Alas, the format of the contest requires that only ten illusions compete per year. We owe a debt of gratitude to each individual participant.
The illusionists showcased in this book were amazingly generous in providing their time and expertise to help us develop a deeper understanding of their creations, as well as the circumstances of their discoveries. They have guided many aspects of this project, answering very kindly our requests for information, fact-checking, and proofreading, usually with extremely short deadlines. Any errors in the descriptions are ours; the brilliance of the illusions is all theirs.
We are greatly indebted to our good friend Lothar Spillmann, who has been a constant supporter of our research and science communication over the years. Lothar encouraged us to host the European Conference on Visual Perception, which led to the birth of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest, and he gave us tons of great advice along the way.
The first edition of the contest, held during the ECVP meeting in 2005, was co-hosted by the Museos Científicos Coruñeses (Scientific Museums of A Coruña) and Dygrafilms. We thank Marcos Pérez (technical director of Casa de las Ciencias) and Ramón “Moncho” Núñez Centella (one of the premier science communicators in the world, and at the time director of the MC2) for their unwavering support and enthusiasm for our joint project. Marcos and Moncho were the first to teach us how to communicate exciting science to nonspecialists, and this book might not exist had we not met them. Our good friend Luis Martinez, who lived in A Coruña at the time of the conference, single-handedly ran its local organization.
Making the contest into an annual event required the formation of a nonprofit organization, which we called the Neural Correlate Society. Luis Martinez, together with our close friends Jose-Manuel Alonso, Peter Tse, and Xoana Troncoso, joined us as founding members and have served on the NCS executive board since 2006. Their guidance and strong vision have been an indispensable anchor.
Our deepest thanks go to the scientists and artists who emceed and performed at the contest for the first ten years. Susana emceed the first contest in Spain, but future contests were emceed by our colleagues and friends Denis Pelli, Margaret Livingstone, Stuart Anstis, and Peter Thompson (the latter two emceed the contest multiple times, for which we are more grateful than we can say). Mac King generously donated his time to emcee and perform at the contest’s unforgettable tenth anniversary in Saint Petersburg, Florida. James Randi (aka The Amaz!ng Randi) performed at two consecutive contests. Other performers included Thomas Blacke, holder of the Guinness World Record for the Fastest Handcuff Escape Blindfolded and the Guinness World Record for the Fastest Escape from Handcuffs Underwater; the marvelous cellist E. Zoe Hassman, whom we met at a concert in the home of our good friend and colleague Mickey Goldberg; and the Professors (Tim and Tanya Chartier).
The artist Cándido Novo created an original and exclusive sculpture that served as the first-prize trophy awarded in the first year of the contest. The sculptor Guido Moretti donated the illusion trophies that were awarded to the top three winners in the second through the tenth years of the contest. We were fortunate to meet Guido in person in 2010, when he traveled from Italy to Naples, Florida, to attend the contest’s sixth gathering.
Many illusion experts and creators have served as international judges, paring down dozens of illusion submissions to the top ten every year. We thank them all for their efforts: Paola Bressan, Richard Brown, Patrick Cavanagh, David Eagleman, Marcos Pérez, the late Al Seckel, Adrienne Seiffert, George Mather, Suzanne McKee, Dale Purves, Arthur G. Shapiro, Dejan Todorovi´c, Jonathan Winawer, Gideon Caplovitz, Max Dürsteler, Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Beau Lotto, Denis Pelli, Nava Rubin, Gianni Sarcone, Preeti Verghese, Michael Bach, Pietro Guardini, Frederick Kingdom, Margaret Livingstone, Peter Thompson, Niko Troje, Rob Jenkins, Rob van Lier, Eric Mead, Thomas Papathomas, Michael Pickard, Yuval Barkan, Maria Concetta Morrone, Richard Russell, Mark Seteducatti, Lothar Spillmann, Paul Doherty, Alan Gilchrist, Simone Gori, Jan Kremlacek, Xoana Troncoso, Anthony Barnhart, Po-Jang (Brown) Hsieh, Ming Meng, Mark Wexler, Jordan Suchow, Doris Tsao, Olivia Carter, Yuhong Jiang, Roger Newport, Victoria Skye, Christopher Tyler, Arash Afraz, Mahzarin Banaji, Jorge Otero-Millan, Michael Paradiso, Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives, Thérèse Collins, Ava Do, Masashi Nakatani, Kimberly Orsten, Virginie van Wassenhove, and Qasim Zaidi.
Many sponsors have supported the contest over the years, with our thanks: The Mind Science Foundation and Scientific American have provided very generous and repeated support, as have SR Research, Arrington Research, Applied Science Laboratories, Crist Instruments, and SensoMotoric Instruments.
Dozens of volunteers contributed their time and effort to organizing the live contest, many of them for several years. In alphabetical order: Luis Alarcon-Martinez, Sarah Allred, Anthony Barnhart, Marian Berryhill, Marco Boi, Michael Campos, Gideon Caplovitz, James Christensen, Francisco Costela, Jie Cui, Tugba Demirci, Leandro Di Stasi, Simone Gori, Kai Hamburger, Tracey Herlihey, Steve Holloway, Michael Hout, Po-Jang (Brown) Hsieh, Yee Joon Kim, Peter Kohler, Kyle Mathewson, Michael McCamy, Simona Monaco, Ruben Moreno Bote, Ali Najafian Jazi, Jorge Otero-Millan, Nora Paymer, Martina Poletti, Carolyn Posey, Amrita Puri, Hector Rieiro, Alex Schlegel, Asya Shpiro, Aliya Solski, Debi Stranski, the late Alan Stubbs, Lore Thaler, Inna Tsirlin, Steve Walenchok, Tamara Watson, Danelle Wilbraham, Claudia Wilimzig, and Katharina Maria Zeiner. Xoana Troncoso, Jorge Otero-Millan, and Francisco Costela each served as chairs of the volunteer committee multiple times.
The contest’s website has always been critical to sharing each year’s finalist illusions with the wider community, and indispensable after the contest became a full online event in 2015. Jorge Otero-Millan designed the present website and maintained it for most of the contest’s history. He also devised the present online voting system. Daniel Cortes-Rastrollo has helped maintain the contest’s website since 2015 (a complex task, given the varied visual materials to be displayed!). Michael McCamy provided advance content to K–12 teachers for several years. We thank all the website visitors who have provided online donations to support the competition over the years.
The Vision Sciences Society also has our gratitude for kindly integrating the contest into their annual meeting for many years as an official satellite event. A special thank-you goes to former VSS presidents Marisa Carrasco and Frans Verstraten, who worked hard to ensure a very successful and seamless collaboration between VSS and the contest, even letting us rent part of the VSS venue to hold the contest’s tenth edition in 2014. Gideon Caplovitz and Arthur G. Shapiro made every effort to integrate the contest into the VSS program and coordinate it with the VSS Demo Night.
We have been incredibly fortunate to have the continued friendship and support of Mariette DiChristina, the editor in chief of Scientific American. Our relationship with the Scientific American family has been immensely rewarding over the years, which is one of the main reasons that we were so keen to move from our former home in Phoenix to New York City. In writing articles and blogs for Scientific American, Scientific American Mind, and the Scientific American website, we have worked with many wonderful editors, writers, and administrators. All of them have been uniformly outstanding, and helped make our writing so much better and clearer. Mariette herself, Daisy Yuhas, Kristin Ozelli, Claudia Wallis, Liz Tormes, Avonelle Wing, Ingrid Wickelgren, Ericka Skirpan, Kerrissa Lynch, Maya Harty, Andrea Gawrylewski, Christine Gorman, Fred Guterl, and Peter Brown worked with us on our articles for Scientific American and Scientific American Mind, as well as on three Scientific American special issues on illusions, published in 2010, 2013, and 2016. David Dobbs, Jonah Lehrer, and Gareth Cook served as editors of our online writings and subsequent column on the neuroscience of illusion, in the former Mind Matters section of ScientificAmerican.com. In 2013, our Mind Matters column gave rise to our present Illusion Chasers blog, edited first by Bora Zivkovic, then by Brainard Curtis, and presently by Michael Lemonick.
The idea for this book started with a number of feature articles that Mariette DiChristina commissioned for Scientific American Mind on the illusions submitted to the annual contest. It obviously made sense to compile and extend these writings into a full volume to be published under the Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint. Our editors at FSG, Amanda Moon and Scott Borchert, guided us capably and knowledgeably through writing and revising. They are a true pleasure to work with.
We were privileged to have Jim Levine, of the Levine Greenberg Rostan literary agency, as our agent again, and to work again with his team, including Kerry Sparks and Elizabeth Fisher. All of them helped us with our previous book, Sleights of Mind, and we look forward to future projects together.
This book benefited greatly from the artwork of Robert Alexander, Jordi Chanovas Colomé, Daniel Cortes Rastrollo, Max Dorfman, Hector Rieiro, and Jorge Otero-Millan, who conceptualized and rendered many illustrations to help the reader visualize dynamic illusions in printed form. Jordi, Daniel, Max, and Rosario Malpica provided vital writing and administrative support for this project.
We are indebted to the funding organizations and individual sponsors that supported our laboratories’ research programs and related academic endeavors and resulted in this book: the Barrow Neurological Foundation, the Mind Science Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, Science Foundation Arizona, the Arizona Biomedical Research Commission, the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium, the Dana Foundation, Procter & Gamble, Mrs. Grace Welton, Mrs. Marian Rochelle, the Empire Innovator Program, and Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc.
Finally, we thank our families. Steve’s mother, Sarah Macknik, flies several times a year from Atlanta to New York to visit us and help us take care of our children, often while we are working on the contest. She has traveled with us to many countries, on three different continents. Our kids, Iago, Brais, and Nova, have participated in many informal perception experiments at home, and make it all worth it. They are, without doubt, our most successful and important collaboration, and the ongoing project that fills our hearts with the most joy.