People have been left scratching their heads after seeing a black and white image of a horse transform into colour in front of their eyes – but they don’t understand how it works
An optical illusion has left people gobsmacked as it tricks their brains into seeing a black and white image in full colour – providing you do one essential thing. Sharing the illusion, Dean Jackson, who is known on social media as @beatonthebeeb, shared a black and white image of a horse surrounded by sunflowers and paving stones.
He claims the illusion only works on those who focus in on the horse’s eye throughout his one-minute explanation, sharing how you’ll see the image turn from black and white to full colour due to “retinal fatigue”. During the clip, he superimposes the picture to show “psychedelic colours” – such as turning the sunflowers blue – have been purposely added to “fatigue some of the receptors in your retina”.
Dean added: “When I remove them [the superimposed colours] only the ones that are needed to colour the picture should be stimulated.”
From there, he goes on to countdown to the end of the video before it links back to the start.
Commenting on the clip, one impressed user said: “For a split second it was so much colourful than I thought.”
Another user added: “Wild. When I looked to the side at the flowers, it immediately went black and white. I’d shift my focus back to the eye and the colours came back! Incredible!”
A third user said: “I definitely wasn’t expecting it to be so vivid.”
One more user added: “I saw so much colour I got jump scared and blinked.” Another user said: “It absolutely worked but as soon as I blinked it went back to being black and white but didn’t expect the colours to be that vibrant. Really good job.”
A final user added: “That’s so cool. when I look away from the eye it’s black and white again, but if I look back into the eye the colour came back.”
How optical illusions work?
Optical illusions do not only trick the eye but they deceive how the brain interprets visual information.
A statement on How Stuff Works reads: “Our perception of optical illusions is controlled by our brains.
“For example, the brain can easily flip between two different views of an object to turn something that’s two-dimensional on a piece of paper into an object that we perceive as being 3D.
“But how? It’s complicated. The 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded, in part, to David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for their discoveries in how the brain interprets the coded communications sent to it from the eyes.
“They learned that there is a stepwise process in how the brain analyses what the eye sees.
“Each nerve cell or neuron in the brain is responsible for a specific detail in the pattern of the retinal image.
“But even with Hubel and Wiesel’s discoveries and our knowledge of the different parts of the brain that deal with colour, form, motion and texture, scientists still don’t really have a sense for how all the messages come together to produce our overall perception of an object.”
