It is likely that on more than one occasion you remained long minutes with your eyes fixed on the screen, trying to decipher that optical illusion that is traveling across social networks, but you get nothing for more than you try. If you are one of those people who find it hard to see the tricks hidden in the optical illusions, this will not be an exception.
It was created by Anthony Norcia, of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, and is simply amazing. Most people only see a series of squares, and some will not see the 16 circles that are hidden in the image.
After a few minutes, some get angry thinking that this optical illusion is a tease but in reality you just need to have a little patience and fix your eyes in the center of the image. After a few seconds you will see the circles. The funny thing is that once you see them, it’s hard to see the squares again, because your brain has already captured which image you want to give the most meaning to.
Why we can’t see the circles the first time?
Our visual system is formed by the eyes and the brain, basically it is photoreceptors and neurons, which can be understood as pieces of the brain ‘extruded’. A part of the processing is done in the eyes, but most of it takes place in the brain.
When we look at an image, what we really see is the light that bounced off and entered our eyes, which turn that light into electrical impulses that travel to the brain, where they are transformed into an image to which we give meaning.
This process is very fast, it hardly takes a tenth of a second, but we cannot forget that our eyes receive a constant flow of light, an incredible amount of information that our brain is simply unable to process in unison to give it a coherent sense. In practice, it would be something like trying to drink a sip of water using a fire hose.
Since it is so difficult to process all visual information, our brain decides to take shortcuts to make the decoding process more efficient. How it does? Simplifying what we see to help us focus on the most important thing, this allows us to compensate the processing delay of that tenth of a second.
In practice, as a result of the experience, our brain already has predetermined shortcuts to help us process more quickly what we see. That is precisely what this optical illusion takes advantage of. For example, as a general rule, our brain prioritizes sharp shapes on curves because it considers them more dangerous. That is the reason why we first look at the squares and only after to the circles.
To this is added that the neurons compete with each other to see the light and dark parts of the image, so it is necessary to first prioritize one meaning and then the other. Therefore, the time you need to see the circles of this optical illusion, can tell you how rigid are the shortcuts that your brain has created to process visual information, or how easy it is for you to “hack” those shortcuts.
