A friend sent me a link to one of those optical illusion thingies. I'm often very sceptical of them however upon inspection, this one seemed different and legitimate. I dont think its fake - but I equally dont understand why its screws with your eye's so much! Here are the instructions from the website…
If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink. If you stare at the black + in the center, the moving dot turns to green. Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating if you're lucky! It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see.
From origional page: http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html
10/10 So Cool
10/10 So Cool
Explanation and analogy.
In this instance your brain is working in a pretty much similar way to an 'Auto White Balance' of a digital camera. The brain first sees the correct image, magenta spots on a grey background with the rotating spot missing.
Then after a while your brain starts to ignore (or White Balance) these magenta dots to error correct for any retinal problems but of course there are none.
At the same time the retina of your eye produces a 'burn in' effect, albeit subtle but still effective in completing the illusion.
Once this cycle is complete, mostly 5 seconds or so, the brain has compensated for 'white balance' and to a much lesser extent 'retina burn' and balanced the areas that are seeing magenta back to a perceived grey tone.
When the magenta areas of the image disappear, they then produce the 'false negative' effect, making you see green when in fact there is none.
Simple when you think about it. Nature always thinks of things first!
Thanks!
cubanimal - thats is a brilliant explanation. I'm no expert so have no idea if its right or not, but it certainly sounds logical and impressive!