These optical illusions ‘disappear’ — can you solve scientific explanation?
nypost.comaccording to the University of Glasgow’s IllusionsIndex.org, was named for the first person to describe the phenomenon, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, in 1804.
The Swiss physician noticed that when the eye becomes fixated on a point, the objects surrounding that focal point eventually “disappear.”And the more unfocused the periphery, the more pronounced the effect.[Warning: Spoilers ahead.]The illusion illustrates what happens when our eyes are hyper focused on a single target.
The way we see images is through countless micromovements of the eye, each time collecting more information about the scene, even when we feel our gaze is relatively focused.
But when we tell our eyes to look — hard — at a single point, those tiny movements, called saccades, become concentrated on that object, allowing for the stimuli around it to fade into the mind’s eye.The effect may be even more pronounced in the image below, depicting the outline of a blurry blue circle with a tiny red dot at the center.The mechanism behind Troxler effect is rooted in our own nervous system — and thus can be observed not only through the eyes, but with touch as well.
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