Remember when people couldn’t decide if that striped dress was blue and black or white and gold? Or that time when no one knew whether they were hearing someone say “Yanny” or “Laurel?”
Well, get ready for a new conspiracy meme to cause a riff in your friend group.
According to HuffPost , a viral video has once again divided the internet, pitting friend against friend as people everywhere struggle to answer one burning question: is that a rabbit or a raven?
The video was posted to Twitter on Monday and has since racked up nearly 4.5 million views.
Uploader Dan Quintana captioned the 30-second clip, “Rabbits love getting stroked on their nose”. This would normally be a pretty unremarkable post, except people aren’t so sure that is, in fact, a rabbit that Dan is so candidly handling.
Some speculate that he’s not rubbing a black rabbit’s nose, but the back of a raven’s head.
Most of the confusion has to do with what is either a pair of pointing rabbit ears or a raven’s open beak. If you really look at it for long enough, you start seeing a bird with its head tipped back, beak slack as it enjoys a good scalp scratching.
It really doesn’t help that the “ears” don’t twitch or the “beak” doesn’t close at all during the video.
“Seriously, what am I looking at?” one user wrote. “I can’t handle this kind of mental pressure right now.”
But one clue has many people confidently confirming this MUST be a raven.
At one point in the clip, the rabbit/raven blinks its black eye in a definite non-rabbit way, sort of more like something you’d seen from a crocodile. That is to say, a blink in which the creature’s eyelid moves from side to side, rather than up or down.
Ergo, raven.
Others have pointed out this mysterious being bears a striking resemblance to a white-necked raven.
Notice the bird’s white-tipped beak. Awfully similar to those white-tipped “ears”, wouldn’t you say?
These particular winged creatures are native to Eastern and Southern Africa and are known for nesting on cliffs and eating some pretty large prey, from carrion birds to tortoises.
The original poster has since come forward to confirm that the video is of a bird, not a rabbit.
Quintana explained he was inspired to share the video because “the static-bird/rabbit illusion is wel-known within psychology and philosophy.”
“I thought it was fairly clear that the video was of a bird (unlike the original image, which is designed to be ambiguous,” he said. “Because of this, I made the rabbit comment to prime people into thinking it was actually a rabbit, to give it a fighting chance, so to speak, in this recreation of the original illusion.”
According to Quintana, it was “fascinating” to see how priming people with that original “rabbit” comment influenced what many people saw in the video.
“Of course,” he added, “a tweet like this is among the furthest things from a rigorous laboratory experiment, but it’s still interesting nonetheless.”
Interesting, sure. But this little video also probably destroyed many friendships and broke apart families as people struggled to decipher what exactly their poor eyes were seeing. But yeah, all in the name of science, I guess.
h/t: HuffPost
