This Is (Officially) The Best Illusion Of The Year

It’s no David Copperfield, but in this day and age surely that’s a good thing? Winner of the Best Illusion of the Year contest, this moving circle of dots tricks the eye into seeing changing colour even when they’re not.

While you may not see it, the dots in the video above are always changing colour, even when they are moving. This visual illusion takes advantage of a phenomenon called “change blindness” in which your brain cannot detect changes when it is distracted by movement and other visual stimuli.

In this illusion, your brain cannot focus on all the details of a scenery at once and picks up the movement over the colour changes. In a more distressing example, you could miss the car pulling into traffic because of the bird poo that just hit your window. [Scientific American]