I could not have been more confident in my answer when the teacher called on me to share with the class what image she was projecting on the screen. “It’s a picture of a young woman!” I said. Without a moment’s hesitation, one of my classmates blurted out, “No! It’s a picture of an old woman!” And with that, the class began to debate whether the picture was of a younger woman or an older woman.
This picture is known as an ambiguous figure, or an example of multistable perception. This phenomenon shows how the brain actively builds what we see from incomplete information, shifting between plausible interpretations when none clearly prevails. These images have a long and fascinating history at the intersection of art, psychology, philosophy, and theology.
In the nineteenth century, ambiguous images became scientifically important when psychology began to study perception systematically. For example, the Necker Cube (1832), described by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker, is a simple line drawing of a cube that flips orientation in your mind.
Long before psychology named the phenomenon, artists were already experimenting with visual ambiguity. In the Renaissance, for example, artists sometimes embedded double images or hidden forms in paintings: faces hidden in landscapes, or works that played with perception and symbolism.
In part, this is why two people can look at a piece of art – or witness a car accident – and give different accounts. We form opinions based on how our brains filter what we experience. That filter is shaped largely by our personal stories and the biases that come with them. As theologian Thomas Aquinas suggested, “Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower.”
Multistable perception is at a fever pitch in our world. Fueled by social media, political manipulation and entrenched bias is manifesting a world where people are looking through two different lenses. “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” – Immanuel Kant
One of the most powerful activities we have offered at a camp where I serve in the summer is based on Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1–19). Two young people who have little to no prior relationship are invited to go on a walk together and, through a series of questions, are asked to listen, learn, and be open to seeing things differently. Consistently, when the pairs return, they share about having a new perception. Like Saul, who becomes Paul, “scales fall from their eyes.”
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust
“The truth will make you free.” – John 8:32
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