This Viral Optical Illusion Is Driving People Crazy

An optical illusion has taken the internet by storm and it’s frustrating viewers across the globe. The simple image of connected gray lines has a few nodes with a black dot. How many dots do you see? The question sounds simple, but your brain makes answering it more than a little difficult.

As we try to count the black spots our eyes move from dot to dot, but as we focus on a new dot, one of the old dots seems to vanish. When we look back the dot reappears, but another one vanishes! We may think we are looking at the whole picture, but that’s not what’s really happening. As our eyes fixate on one specific location, our subconsious brain fills in the gaps with similar surrounding data. The crisscrossing gray pattern “overlaps” the dots in our mind and they seem to disappear.

Try covering up portions of the pattern with a piece of paper to defeat the illusion and try counting the dots a second time. We promise there are 12, even if it doesn’t look that way.