Andrew Gallimore

Yeah, I've seen this.

You've seen this, right?

Yeah, so the original was with Margaret Thatcher.

So this is called the Thatcher effect.

So when you're looking at this image of Margaret Thatcher or anyone, your brain is constructing a model of this person, a model of their face.

And as I said, it's constructed over a hierarchy.

So you have the overall image.

idea the overall concept of margaret thatcher right the whole face the whole thing right and then you have a lower level you have the eyes and the mouth and the nose and they're kind of separate and then going further still within the eyes you've got circles and patches of color and all this stuff and right at the bottom you have this really messy system of lines and things that don't make any sense right um

And you can actually show how this hierarchy is constructed.

At the moment, it just looks like Margaret Thatcher and you can't really break it down.

But if you flip over like this, so just leave it there for a second, Jamie, please.

So now you see what we've done is we've basically weakened this highest level model of the whole face because the brain isn't very good at building hierarchy.

models of faces that are upside down.

Right?

Okay.

And so this looks... There's something wrong with the image, clearly.

But it looks like Margaret Thatcher upside down.

It looks like Margaret Thatcher, but actually what's happened is the whole face has been flipped over, but the mouth and the eyes are actually the correct way up.

Right.

Right.