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Stare at this picture of Jesus. What does this have to do with the Shroud of Turin?
There are various version of this image on the Internet. They all work essentially the same way. Stare at the four dots in the center of the picture for about thirty seconds. Then close your eyes and tilt your head back. After a short while you will see an “amazing picture of Jesus.” Sometime it is described as a “miraculous picture of Jesus.”
You may see the effect, the optical illusion, better if instead of closing your eyes you look at a flat white wall:
There is nothing really amazing or miraculous about this. It is an optical illusion. It has to do with persistence of vision (POV). This optical illusion will, with varying degrees of success, work with any high contrast negative. What you see is essentially the following image. To see it better, squint at the following picture.
The relationship to the Shroud of Turin is probably anecdotal. Some people have speculated that because the Shroud images are negatives, perhaps people stared at them for a long time and then closed their eyes or looked at a wall or the sky and saw the more realistic image that we see when the Shroud is photographed – and they might have thought this was highly miraculous. Some have even speculated that this optical illusion may be at the root of post-resurrection stories. I don’t know of any recorded description of this optical illusion. Nor have I been able to see the optical illusion with a photograph from the Shroud. Nor do I know of anyone who reports seeing the effect.
See: What do we mean when we say the images on the Shroud of Turin are negative?
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© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
