Hardly Anyone Can See All 12 Dots In This Picture
How’s your brain feeling today? In need of a test, by any chance? Knew it.
In today’s installment of ‘the internet can’t handle this optical illusion’, we have this grey and white line thing, with little black dots on it…. or are there?
Basically, someone posted this optical illusion to Imgur, and the people of the internet just couldn’t quite handle it. No matter how hard you try, which way you tilt your head, or how hard you squint your eyes - you can’t see all of the dots. As soon as you move your eyes to a different dot, the one you were looking at vanishes.
This isn’t a gif. Your eyes just can’t see all 12 back dots at the same time.
Derek Arnold, a vision scientist at the University of Queensland in Australia, has explained the science behind the frustrating dots.
The black dot in the centre of your vision should always appear. But the black dots around it seem to appear and disappear, which is because humans have terrible peripheral vision. If you focus on a word in the centre of this line you’ll probably see it clearly.
But if you try to read the words at either end without moving your eyes, they most likely look blurry. As a result, the brain has to make its best guess about what’s most likely to be going on in the fuzzy periphery — and fill in the mental image accordingly.
Which, presumably, means that if you can see all the black dots in the image you basically have superhuman vision.
It’s too much for a Monday morning, right? My bad guys, sorry.
@wkerslake @GWillowWilson I can see two and I SWEAR I can see the others running away from me.
— Kate (@mscogsworthy) September 11, 2016
the places where I can’t see black circles are just flickering multiple colours holy shit @wkerslake
— Ryan (@RedBSierra) September 12, 2016
What do you think? Let us know in the comments
Sources: The Verge, Zeiss
Lead image: Imgur