This Illusion Is Not Here

And now . . . !

The AMAZING DISAPPEARING OPTICAL ILLUSION!

Keep your eyes fixed on the Plus Sign in the center of the illusion.

You will see a green dot that ISN’T THERE sweeping around the circle of pink dots.

Then you will see the pink dots that ARE THERE totally . . . DISAPPEAR!

Do it right and you can get them ALL to disappear!

GET STARTED STARING!

YEE-HAW!

NOTE FOR THE COLORBLIND: Your mileage may vary. Sorry. 🙁

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

20 thoughts on “This Illusion Is Not Here”

  8. Here is a whole collection of interesting optical illusions with another one similar to this, called “Motion Induced Blindness.”
    I cannot over emphasize how important this is to pilots and other folks involved in moving things through space, using “Head Up” displays combinging moving computer graphics and real world views, etc.

  9. Credits to anyone? Or Jimmy did you write this on your own?
    Someone (who doesn’t read the blog or I would have CHT’d him) e-mailed it to me. Have no idea where it came from originally.

  11. You should know that this is actually a reasonable response. How so? It takes some technological knowledge here….
    Gray on a computer monitor is the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) pixels on at half their intensity. Pure white is full intensity, gray is 50%, and black is 0%.
    Light pink is R=100%, G=50%, B=100% and so when light pink turns to gray, the G is bumped up 50% and the rest down by 50%… so the eyes are picking up the spike in green.
    ENJOY! 🙂

  13. Working in the 1982 as an Electrical Designer for an Engineering firm in Irvine California, I was able to work on the first round of CAD (Computer Aided Design) machines, which we used to design and create drawings.
    Back then, the computer screens were not color, but GREEN PHOSPHORUS displays.
    After looking at these display screen ALL DAY in a SEMI-DARK engineering bay, really put a strain on one’s eyes.
    At the end of the day, everything that was white in color would appear PINK! Including white shirts, teeth, white acoustic ceiling tiles and, get this, the white lines that divide the lines on the street! Now that really freaked me out when this first happened to me.
    tim

  16. The green dot is a phenomenon known as a negative afterimage. And it can be experienced with printed images too.
    The color sensors (cones) in the retina translate color as a combination of the three additive primaries, red, green and blue. But the next layer of the retina analyzes color in complementary (either/or) messages; red or green, yellow or blue, black or white.
    Staring at a certain color long enough causes reduced sensitivity to that color. In the sudden absence of that color the retina compensates with the colors complement. In this case green in place of red.
    Some still examples can be found here:
    http://library.thinkquest.org/27066/theeye/nlsuccontrast.html
    (bottom of the page)
    Aint science cool!

  17. Pretty freaky.
    Now….we here in NZ have just had our National Elections, and its a virtual draw between the National Conservative centre/right, and Labour and the lefties.
    Because the Labour colour is red – or pink – can we engineer something to make them disappear?
    Just asking – would make NZ a much better country if it worked.

  18. Oh great. Thanks a lot. For years I have been on the run from a man in black with at least three fingers, a duck that only speaks pig-Latin Greek, and a green dot.
    And now you let the green dot right into my home.
    So I guess I have to move.
    Again.

  19. This thing works for the same reasons the little the goofy colored American flag
    ‘looks right’ after you stare at it a bit…and then look at a white piece of paper.
    Remember that little ditty in your 8th grade science book?
    Mike is on track with his explantion but it needs to go further.
    1) simultaneous contrast (yellowish-green is complentary to the violet) wherein if
    you stare at one color, its complement is spontaneously generated in your eye(s).
    2) complementary colors mixed together will always produce a gray, as in the gray background behind the
    yellowish-green and violet dots);
    3) the reticule (crosshair) insures registration of the complementary color produced (‘burned in your brain’)
    on your retina in relation to the array of violet dots. (If you do not stare at the
    reticule, the violet dots will not disappear.)
    Yes, science is cool.
    But so is art.
    The principle, of ‘simultaneous contrast’, was understood intuitively by
    the great artists of the past, which explains, partly, why their paintings
    are so beautifully colored and why they are so difficult to imitate, even when
    we know what ‘tube’ colors they used.
    The masters of painting understood that fields of color affect one another (as
    perceived by the human eye/brain) and thus, when they mixed their colors,
    they knew to compensate for simultaneous contrast. For example, a master’s ‘red’ apple
    on a field of ‘green’ isn’t really as full of ‘red’ pigment as the amatuer (student) would tend
    to make it…because the field of green is already producing ‘red’ (the complement of
    red) in the eye of the beholder. The master sees, the student doesn’t.
    This phenomenon has to be learned by most painting students today.

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