Celebrities as Monsters and the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect"

Watch this video while staring at the cross in the center, and you'll see celebrities become monsters right before your eyes.

This is an incredible optical illusion called Flashed Face Distortion Effect that was discovered by Sean Murphy an undergraduate student at the University of Queensland.

Here’s a brief intro from Matthew Thompson, this is part of a research project by Matthew Thompson which investigates how the brain compares and exaggerates the differences between two faces when they're briefly flashed up on screen alongside each other.
"Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive. We called it the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect” and wanted to share it with the world, so we put it on YouTube".

"The effect seems to depend on processing each face in light of the others. By aligning the faces at the eyes and presenting them quickly, it becomes much easier to compare them, so the differences between the faces are more extreme. If someone has a large jaw, it looks almost ogre-like. If they have an especially large forehead, then it looks particularly bulbous".

[Previously on ...optical illusion at Unscathed Corpse]