It’s the multi-headed hydra of optical illusions.
The internet is blowing a collective gasket over a triple-tiered eye test in which objects seem to disappear and appear right before the viewer’s eyes.
A tweet detailing the eye-fecta has amassed over 4.5 million views as viewers struggle to complete the trippy hat trick.
On its face, the image appears to entail a plus sign surrounded by a ring of pink circles with another invisible one circumnavigating them like a retinal roulette wheel.
However, this test is more than meets the eye: Try and follow the pink circle and “you will see all pink,” per the tweet. Meanwhile, focusing on the plus sign will change the circling sphere to green.
Viewers can cause the pink circles to vanish from the visual centrifuge by keeping their peepers trained on the cross for an extended period of time.
This will cause it the green ball to appear as if it’s orbiting the addition symbol on its own.
Needless to say, this head trip induced web-wide brain strain with one perplexed puzzle lover commenting, “I see both green and pink at the same time.”
“Me trying to make all the pink circles disappear,” quipped another along with the immortal meme of the student with his veins bulging out of their head.
As one Twitter user observed, this mind-bending illusion is likely caused by a phenomenon called the Troxler effect or Troxler’s fading, in which gazing at a fixed point will cause peripheral objects and colors to disappear.
The mechanics behind the effect — named after Swiss physician and philosopher Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler — continue to elude scientists, BigThink.com reported. However, experts theorize that the phenomenon is related to how our brain perceives certain stimuli.
According to BigThink.com, “unchanging stimuli will eventually disappear from our awareness while our mind will fill the areas where they used to be with the background information (or color).” Hence the disappearing pink spheres.
“A ‘sensory fading’ or ‘filling-in’ is linked to saccades – involuntary eye movements that happen even when the gaze appears settled,” they write.
This effect is amplified when the stimulus image is in low contrast or is blurred, per the site.
As with many optical illusions, this phenomenon perhaps ultimately demonstrates the capacity of the human mind to jump to conclusions.
