Mind blown.

If one more thing breaks the internet we’re all going to be in trouble, and today this is the image staking its claim.

Black and blue or white and gold (neither, burn it and avoid the issue) – at least we have all moved on from that mess.

Now the focus falls onto the ’12 dots’ optical illusion, which has some racking their brains as to why they can’t see them all at the same time.

Right, we’ll take a look before we analyse:

Now for the science from The Verge:

In this optical illusion, the black dot in the center of your vision should always appear. But the black dots around it seem to appear and disappear. That’s because humans have pretty bad peripheral vision. If you focus on a word in the center 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.

That means that when you’re staring at that black dot in the center of your field of view, your visual system is filling in what’s going on around it. And with this regular pattern of gray lines on a white background, the brain guesses that there’ll just be more of the same, missing the intermittent black dots.

Memorise that, tell your friends and colleagues over lunch, be heralded as a genius.

You’re welcome.

[source:theverge]