Will staring at an image designed by a Japanese neurologist measure your stress levels depending on how fast elements of the image appear to be rotating? No, that's not true: The image is optical illusion art by Yurii Perepadia, a Ukrainian graphic designer. Elements of the image may appear to rotate based on what's called the "peripheral drift illusion." The brain perceives movement in the direction of dark to light in adjacent areas of the graphic -- there is no scientific evidence backing the claim that optical illusions are related to stress levels.
The image was first published on September 27, 2016 (archived here), on Twitter, by Perepadia. As far back as 2017, the image has circulated with a false caption, recently resurfacing in a reel posted on Facebook (archived here) on August 10, 2024. It was captioned:
Which one are you? 👀
The text caption on this image reads:
This image was created by a Japanese neurologist. If the image is still, you are calm, if the image moves a bit, stressed and if it moves like a carousel, you are very stressed. Tell me how are you doing?
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Aug 15 15:19:37 2024 UTC)
Another version of this false claim using Perepadia's artwork was posted on Twitter (archived here) on November 11, 2018, with a caption presented as a question and answer, introducing the fictitious person "Japanese Psychotherapist Yamamoto Hashima":
Do you see movement?
● Not moving.?
● Moving slowly.?
● Moving fast.?
Japanese Psychotherapist Yamamoto Hashima has developed a test for tiredness.
For Answer Check the details in Comment box. (below the Image). 🌻
Re-tweet the Post.
In the second part of the tweet (archived here), the answer drew some different and alarming conclusions:
Answer--- 🌻🌻🌻
1. The image does not move - you are stable.
2. Slow movement - psycho-emotional exhaustion, desirable rest in sanatorium, resort.
3. Active, hectic movement - dangerous signs of psychosis, neurasthenia.
On November 18, 2018, Perepadia reposted his design (archived here) on his Instagram account @yuryfrom, with a caption in both English and Russian. He gave the background on his image:
I drew this optical illusion in Adobe Illustrator on September 26, 2016. To create it, I used the effect of Akiyoshi Kitaoka This is a white and black stroke on a colored background, this is a white and black stroke on a colored background, which sets in motion the focus of vision and it seems to a person that the details of the image are moving. Japanese psychotherapist Yamamoto Hashima has nothing to do with this picture. Moreover, Yamamoto Hashima does not really exist. Google to help.
In this description, Perepadia credited "the effect" of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a professor of psychology at Ritsumeikan University in Osaka, Japan. He has written several books on optical illusions and is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Illusion. In a 2017 book, "The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions," Kitaoka wrote the chapter (.PDF here) on "The Fraser-Wilcox Illusion and Its Extension." He provided many illustrations and broke down "anomalous motion illusions" into categories.
Kitaoka has a page of his website (archived here) dedicated to the internet "rumor that claims positive correlation between stress and anomalous motion illusion." He states emphatically:
There is no known scientific evidence that there is any relationship between stress tolerance and optical illusions.
Since April 29, 2011, Kitaoka has recorded efforts to find the source of the evolving false rumor that was associated with several of his copyrighted optical illusion designs. Three of these, "Flowers," "Roller" and "Acorns," were made by Kitaoka in April 2004. Lead Stories found a very early example of the "stress test" claim with a reverse image search -- the three designs had been uploaded without a credit to Flickr by @sfhippie "John Doe" on August 15, 2005: stress1, stress2, stress3. Aside from the numbering, each of the three slides on Flickr were captioned the same:
Stress test image 1.
The slower it moves for you, the more stress you're able to handle.
At the time this fact check was written, the claim had previously been reviewed by multiple fact-checking organizations, including Snopes in 2018 and Truth Or Fiction, USA Today and Reuters in 2020.
