Have you ever seen the "spinning dancer" image which can tell if you have a genius level IQ? If not, take a look at the post as it makes a bold claim:

See if you can make her go one way and then the other by shifting the brain’s current. If you can switch between seeing her turn either way at will without shifting your gaze, your IQ is above 160 … which is almost at genius level!

So I took a look and sure enough, I could swap the image to spin either way without looking away. I certainly do not consider myself a genius but I did think this was interesting as when I first look at it I almost always see it going counter-clockwise.

After doing a little searching about the spinning dancer, I came across this article which offered some good insight into how it works. In conclusion (in case you don’t want read the full article):

So what does the spinning dancer tell us? The whole test is more of an optical illusion than anything else, according to Steven Novella, an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine who blogs on NeuroLogica. When our brains process visual images to make some order or sense of the world, they have to make assumptions. The dancer is just a two dimensional image switching back and forth, but our brains process it as a three dimensional spinning object.

Depending on the assumptions made and visual cues picked up, your brain can make the dancer spin either way.

By looking at the last link, it confirmed I am not a genius merely by the standards of this test. Bummer, but still interesting.

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