Unbelievable optical illusion ‘breaks your brain’ into thinking cubes are spinning
OPTICAL illusions are sometimes easy to wrap your head around once explained but the following is sure to leave your brain scrambled.
A gif of flashing cubes has been blowing the minds of Twitter users, simply because the stationary squares look like they’re moving even though they’re not.
The brain tricking gif was tweeted by Japanese Twitter user @jagarikin.
It appears to show two animated cubes that are spinning around but if you focus your eyes on one corner of one of the cubes you should see they’re not actually spinning.
If you’re still not convinced try hovering your cursor or holding your finger over one of the cube lines.
The blue cube frames you’re looking at are actually in the exact same position for the entire sequence and it’s just the colours around them that are changing.
What’s really happening here is something called the reverse phi illusion.
It plays on how our brains perceive motion.
This is because when our eyes witness sudden transitions between light and dark, our brain is tricked into thinking that motion is happening.
In the illusion, this is aided by the fact the cubes edges are either surrounded by white, grey or black lines.
As the video’s background also switches between these colours, the viewer is tricked into seeing a rotating cube.
One reply to @jagarikin states that blinking your eyes quickly helps you see the cubes for what they really are.
This kind of trick is used by animators as it saves them some time.
The science behind optical illusions
This brief explanation may help to unscramble your brain...
- Optical illusions make a little bit more sense when you learn that our eyes have very little to do with what we see and it is our brains that play the key role in creating images and trying to protect us from the potential threats around us
- Our brain is constantly trying to make sense of the world at the quickest pace it can despite the world being in 3D and the images on our retinas being in 2D
- It can be really difficult for your brain to interpret everything at once so it will often take shortcuts and give you a simplified version of what you see so you can have quicker reaction times if the object you’re looking at looks dangerous
- When you look at an object what you’re really seeing is the light that bounced off of it and entered your eye, which is converted into electrical impulses that your brain then turns into an image
- Our brains can warp straight lines if an object in the middle of them looks like it’s drawing closer as it wants to emphasize the potential threat
- Different colours and light and dark can make the same sized objects look different or make patterned images look like they’re spinning
In other news, this optical illusion tricks you into seeing black and white picture in colour.
This one tricks you into seeing a brunette woman on the wall.
And, a nauseating optical illusion that’s fittingly been dubbed ‘Chunder Thunder’ has been confusing viewers.
What do you make of the cup illusion? Let us know in the comments…
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk