Mind-boggling optical illusion will make the circles vanish before your eyes… does it work for you?

A MIND-BOGGLING optical illusion has left viewers scratching their heads as circles appear to vanish before your eyes.

The visual starts with a viewer seeing a series of lilac-coloured dots arranged in a circle around a focal point.

For the optical illusion to work you need to stare at the black cross in the centre of the circle for at least 20 seconds.

At first there will appear to be a space appearing running around the lilac dots.

After a while you will see a green circle replacing the purple as it moves in a clockwise motion.

Give the black cross your focus for even longer and the lilac circles will disappear altogether and you will only see the green dot racing around in a circular fashion.

But be careful not to break your gaze as the green dot will disappear and the illusion will fade.

Don't believe us? Give it a try for yourself.

First created in 2005, the mind-boggling visual is commonly known as the or the pacman illusion.

According to its inventor Jeremy Hinton, "the illusion illustrates Troxler fading, complementary colours, negative after-effects, and is capable of showing colours outside the display gamut."

The illusion works because of negative retinal afterimage where parts of the retina in our eye becomes overstimulated and desensitised.

Negative afterimage means we can continue to see colours briefly even after a stimulus is no longer present.

The mind-trick is also an example of apparent movement which is when you see something in one spot and again in a slightly different spot, you tend to perceive movement.

Recently, a similar illusion of a moving white dot also had the internet baffled and divided.

Meanwhile this optical illusion using shadows left viewers stumped - can YOU guess what's behind the image?