Optical illusion

Friday, June 10th, 2005

I’m normally not too impressed with optical illusions, but this one’s pretty cool.

The cool thing here is how the magenta spots disappear when you stare focus on the cross in the center and all you see is a moving green spot. I’m not sure how it works, but it seems to me the brain is filtering out the magenta spots because it believes they are nothing more than overexposed spots on the retina. Fascinating. Who knows what kind of things our brains filter out without us knowing it?

_{Via J-walk blog}