In the theater, and perhaps in life, Mr. Gordon seems to posit that illusion is reliable — reality is the slippery one.
Reliable responses to this illusion emerge at around 8 or 9 years (Tremblay, Champoux, Voss, Bacon, Lapore & Theoret, 2007), the same age at which children robustly use visual cues to help overcome noise in the auditory signal (Wightman, Kistler & Brungart, 2006).
Our findings that onset time and illusion duration are reliable measures suggest that investigations of the RHI stand to benefit by devoting more attention to data collected while the RHI is being experienced, in particular data concerning temporal dynamics.
However, the degree to which pictorial illusions provide a systematic and reliable means to address the timeframe of dorsal visual processing is questioned by accumulating evidence that illusions "trick" both visually and memory-guided responses [22] [25; for reviews of this issue see 26 27].
For this game Stuart Broad has been rested to undergo strength training, but is under no illusion that Tim Bresnan's honest bowling is gaining him favour as a reliable workhorse.
A sigmoid function was fitted to individual observations (see behavioral data analysis in Supplemental Information) to determine the inflection point of each participant's behavioral curve, providing a reliable estimate of the temporal window in which the illusion was maximally perceived (average ∼100 ms; Figure 1A).
Dreams are clearly not the only case in which sensory experience can lead us astray; familiar cases of sensory illusions show that perception is not always reliable.
The effect is surprisingly reliable – if you have any young children hanging about, try the illusion out on them.
In short, it was an illusion that objective ethnographic studies could be produced and reliable comparisons undertaken.
For those who look with a privileged vista, and the genuine capacity to see, perhaps the only reliable defense against being disillusioned is choosing to remain... illusioned.
