A new type of optical illusion tricks the brain into seeing dazzling rays
Creators call the illusion the "scintillating starburst." ...
A new type of mind-bending visual illusion makes people see dazzling rays that aren't really there at all.
The newly discovered illusion, nicknamed the "scintillating starburst," is made up of a simple pattern of concentric wreaths on a plain white background. However, almost everyone who looks at it can see bright rays, or beams, emanating from the center of the design, like sunlight bursting through clouds. The viewer sees these non-existent rays, because the brain "connects the dots" between certain points in the wreaths.
Michael Karlovich, a visual artist with a background in neuroscience, created the scintillating starburst as the logo for his design company, Recursia Studios, in 2019. ...
"When I first saw the illusion I created, I instantly had a hunch I was looking at an effect I had never seen before," Karlovich told Live Science. ...
To find out more, Karlovich teamed up with Pascal Wallisch, a psychologist and data scientist at New York University, to conduct a scientific study on the design. ...
Visual illusions that trick the brain into seeing something that isn't there are not a new phenomenon, but the way this particular illusion works has not been studied and documented before. ...
Karlovich and Wallisch experimented with many different configurations of the scintillating starburst to determine which aspects most influence the effect. ...
The experiments also revealed that spinning the design made the ray effect stronger ...