The Psychosis Test

~ Clarissa

Can you spot the baby in this photo?

image

If you can, you might be psychotic. Researchers at the Universities of Cardiff and Cambridge found that people who showed early signs of psychosis were much better at recognizing the baby than a group of those who did not have psychosis.

I’m happy to report that I don’t see it.

The original photo is here.

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Published by Clarissa

28 thoughts on “The Psychosis Test”

  1. ” found that people who showed early signs of psychosis were much better at recognizing the baby than a group of those who did not have psychosis.”

    Too much negative encouragement!
    You totally should have said that people with genius levels of creativity typically see the baby….. seen what happened and then announced your ‘mistake’. It’s probably a good thing that I never got into designing tests for human subjects, I’d make the Standord Prison Experiment look like the teletubbies.

    I didn’t spend too much time looking for the baby but sort of thought I did (But it was the wrong baby…. you know, the one that the creative geniuses see).

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    1. As a retired physician/psychiatrist, I can tell you that a lot of so-called psychological research is horseshit.

      Anybody who identified a baby in that image got a LOT of encouragement from the researchers.

      There’s always been a difference in the professionalism of psychiatrists (medical doctors who went through medical school and specialty training treating human beings), and psychologists (who got a PhD in a college laboratory studying the behavior of shithouse rats).

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  3. I did not see the baby at all. Even after I knew where the baby was, I had a hard time seeing him/her. Part of the problem is that I had a hard time looking at the image. It made me feel anxious for some reason. It was those two black splotches at the top. They looked vaguely animalistic/human-like but I found them disturbingly distorted. Maybe that’s it’s own type of psychosis. 😉

    Still, I can imagine people who are particularly visually acute might see the baby easily? I would be curious if artist types see the baby. I am also wondering what about psychosis renders the baby difficult to see. Perhaps it’s the ability to see wholeness in fragments? This is very curious to me.

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  4. I saw the baby the second time I saw the image (this image is all around the blogosphere). The first time, the overall picture was as large as it is here, the second time the overall picture was much smaller — I was using my phone, not my laptop the second time — and that made it possible to take in the whole image at once, rather than scan through the black and white blobs. Then I saw the photo and saw that I got it right.

    I don’t think I am psychotic, I think I was an art major decades ago and am good at reading images. So I think Evelina might be right about “artist types.”

    But then again, I suspect that very few people who have psychosis are aware they do ; ^ )

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      2. If you can find the baby in the black-and-white photo, you’ve just won the Quack Lottery, with prizes including Special Medication, Extraordinary Therapy, and Unusual Medical Case Studies …

        On the other hand, if you can see the baby in the picture, maybe the CIA has a job for you — that kind of image recognition would make quick work of the current game known as Where In The World Is ISIS. 🙂

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          1. Because the software is WORDPRESS — a “content management system” so bad that it was probably secretly created by Microsoft.

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  8. I saw the baby immediately without scrolling down to read. I don’t think that means I’m psychotic, but rather once worked professionally as a photographer and have taken and edited thousands of photos.

    Someone above said, “Anybody who identified a baby in that image got a LOT of encouragement from the researchers.”

    The baby is obvious. What else are you supposed to see there?

    It’s amazing that people will say that something they personally can’t do is impossible when to me it was completely clear immediately.

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