The Internet has provided us with so many optical illusions in recent months it’s hard to remember what worries we had before Twitter began to torment us.
But – as was seen with the dress that broke the Internet – it’s often the most simple illusions which cause us humans the most bother.
In the box below there’s a white grid covered in grey lines – OK so that much is obvious – but sitting upon those grey lines are TWELVE little black dots.
There are twelve black dots at the intersections in this image. Your brain won’t let you see them all at once. pic.twitter.com/ig6P980LOT
— Will Kerslake (@wkerslake) September 11, 2016
Now you probably think we’re raving mad but as you look around the box you’ll begin to see dots you hadn’t seen before, but as you find those new dots the original dots which caught your eye will probably disappear.
According to Cosmopolitan and the guy who kicked off this latest round of torture, your brain simply will not allow you to see all of the dots at once.
Scientists have previously explained similar optical illusions in a scientific paper saying:
“When the white disks in a scintillating grid are reduced in size, and outlined in black, they tend to disappear.
“One sees only a few of them at a time, in clusters which move erratically on the page. Where they are not seen, the grey alleys seem to be continuous, generating grey crossings that are not actually present.”
So before you really do spend your entire night chasing dots, have one last glance and accept that some mysteries are just not meant to be solved.
