July 23rd, 2018: Optical Illusion

All the circles are the same color. Yes they are.
Would I lie to you, my oldest and dearest friend... if it didn't involve money or sex.

My eyes are fooled.

My eyes didn't believe you, so I opened it in GIMP and sampled all those colors, and they are identical. My eyes don't believe GIMP either. Stupid eyes.

For me, the ones I'm looking at all look the same color. They only change color in the edge of my vision when I look at a different one.

Right, if you kind of look at the whole thing without focusing on a particular circle or pair of circles, the effect is much more pronounced.

I think this is along the lines of... we don't actually see everything we look at. We think we do, but what we see in our brains is not the exact image that hits the back of our eyes.

The brain does a lot of "filling in" of information. It uses the most power on the thing we're actually focused in on, and just blatantly discards a lot of everything else.

So in this case, the brain expects a certain color to be there based on the patterns, so it just fills in that color for us.

And that is fuckin' wild, the more you think about it. What else did you see wrong today because your brain didn't care about it?

But they asked for how many times white passed the ball, not if the curtain changes. I did see the gorilla though, maybe that's why I lost count. Yeah, that's it, they sabotaged my count.
The brain makes up a lot of shit, that's why stuff doesn't blur when you move your head.