Because it's Friday: Illusions at the Periphery

This fantastic optical illusion has been doing the rounds recently, after being tweeted by Will Kerslake:

There are twelve black dots in that image, but I bet you can only see one or two of them at a time, directly where you're looking. As IFLScience points out, this is an example of an extinction illusion, caused by the software in our brain that fills in for our poor peripheral vision. We're not usually aware of it, but our vision only has good resolution looking directly ahead: our brains fill in the rest of the frame around the center from our blurry peripheral vision, our memories of looking around the scene, and pattern-matching to fill in the gaps. When the peripheral scene includes repeating elements, our brains can override real (but unseen) details, like the black dots at some of the intersections above.

Here's another famous example of the failure of peripheral vision: the celebrity illusion.

Those celebrity faces haven't been modified in any way, but for some reason when our peripheral-support software kicks in they get distorted into grotesque versions of themselves.

That's all from us here at the blog this week. We'll be back on Monday, reporting from the Machine Learning and Data Science Summit in Atlanta. Have a great weekend!