Mind-blowing optical illusion makes eyes appear to change colour – does it work for you?

HOW many colours can you see in the following optical illusion?

You might be surprised to find out there aren’t as many as you initially believe.

1

It actually turns out there are only five and it’s all down to an optical illusion.

Even more shocking is that each column of eyes is the same colour.

The illusion is a well-known eye trick, called the Munker-White illusion.

The effect kicks in because of the tightly coloured lines over them, which deceive what you see.

If you zoom into the image, the illusion fades slightly and you should see the true colour more.

According to Lenstore, which produced the clever image, Psychologist Michael White came up with the concept in the 1960s.

It refers to the perceived lightness of a shape.

For example, the same two grey rectangles appear to have lighter or darker shades of grey when placed next to white or black objects.

In the 1970s, Hans Munker, another psychologist, noticed that the same effect applies to coloured objects.  

“Munker-White’s illusion works by placing a solid-coloured object behind bars of different colours, which influences the way we see them,” explained Sujata Paul from Lenstore.

“It relies on changing the stripes in the foreground and still works even if the colour of the background is changed.

“This skewed perception of colour is caused by a phenomenon which is based on the Bezold effect, named after Professor Wilhelm von Bezold, who discovered that a colour may appear differently depending on its relation to adjacent colours.  

“While some scientists believe that the illusion sets in during the early stages of visual processing, when the light first hits the retina, others think the effects happens later in the brain as it processes the data.”

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