Twitter/TurnYourPhone
For the past 24 hours, the internet has been going into meltdown over this flipped image of Adele.
The image is a seemingly mirrored version of the original, used as the cover art for her album "25." However, if you look at the image upside down you'll see something much more sinister looking.
While the singer's face has been turned upside down, her eyes and mouth have actually been left the right way up. The result is something that looks borderline nightmarish - and people have been going nuts over it.
One Instagram user posted the photoshopped image which has since received over 28,000 likes. They captioned it: "what kind of sorcery is this," while another user said it's "hella creepy."
Twitter/TurnYourPhone
The illusion is what's known as the Thatcher effect, so called after the former British prime minister whose image was first used for the trick.
The Thatcher effect highlights a flaw in how our brains work - we can't process an upside down face.
According to The Naked Scientists, our brains are programmed to recognise faces the right way up. We create a mental map by recognising the face in pieces - eyes, mouth, nose. So when we're presented with an upside down, Thatcherised image, it's not processed properly.
We know it's upside down but because we so rarely encounter upside down faces, we haven't evolved to interpret the expressions on them. The facial features look fine, so our brains assume the rest of the face is as well. That's why we don't see anything out of the ordinary until we orientate the face accordingly.
