Most people have been mesmerized by an optical illusion at some point. Illusions play tricks on our brains, creating confusing images or making us perceive things in weird ways. Colors and patterns play a huge role in these illusions, and setting up certain colors in special designs can trick us to the point where we don’t believe what we’re looking at.
Below are eight incredible illusions that use color to mess with our minds. Each one uses different patterns of colors to display its breathtaking effects.
1. Certain Color Patterns Create Rotating Circles
Did you notice the circle rotating as you scrolled down? This is a still image, not a GIF, so it didn’t actually move. The way the colors and shapes are lined up simply makes your brain think the image is rotating. Similar designs might look like the image is shaking. This is known as an illusory motion or apparent motion.
Illusions like this one use contrasting colors and shapes meant to guide our eyes, such as arrows and curves. With circular illusory motion, the pattern of the circle usually goes in the opposite direction as the pattern of the background. With the addition of contrasting colors, the two opposite patterns make our brains think the circle is rotating even when it’s not. If you zoom in on part of the illusion, it might not look like it’s moving because you’re not seeing all the contrasting elements.
2. Other Color Patterns Look Like They’re Moving Like Waves
Not all illusory motion illusions use circular patterns. Others look like they are bending or moving like waves, such as in this example image. If you move your eyes around the red and green pattern, it looks like the picture is shifting. Yet, if you only zoom in on one part of the image, you can tell that it’s a still image.
As with the rotating images, these illusions rely on contrasting patterns and colors to make the image look like it’s moving. The varying shape sizes, the black and white borders, and the complementary colors all play a role in this image moving. There are plenty of other optical illusions out there with a similar effect where the shapes seem to move like waves.
3. Adding Stripes Could Change an Object’s Perceived Color
In the above image, each column has three squares of the same color. Yet, they don’t all look the same. The first horizontal row shows the squares on their own, while the second and third rows have yellow and dark blue lines added. The second row has the dark blue lines in front while the third row has the yellow lines in front.
These types of illusions use color assimilation and contrast to make the same color look different in certain contexts. Colors often look different depending on the colors they’re surrounded by, which is why the shapes with blue in the front look darker and the shapes with yellow in the front look lighter than they normally would. They’re still the same color as the top shape, but the other colors and patterns trick our brains into seeing something else.
4. The Checker Shadow Illusion Messes With Our Brains
Shadows can alter colors, making them darker. This seems like common sense, but when we see it in action for some illusions, it becomes confusing. As you can see in the above image, a ball is casting a shadow onto a checkered pattern. While it might not seem like it, the two squares with Xs on them are the same exact color. If the image is printed, you can cut out the gray squares on the side to compare.
This illusion type, most commonly known as Adelson’s Checker-Shadow Illusion, confuses people because the square outside the shadow clearly looks darker than the one in the shadow. Yet, if you remove all other elements from the picture except the two squares, those squares look exactly the same.
There are many factors working together at once to make this illusion happen. First of all, our brains compare the squares to those around them. So, the square in the shadow looks lighter than it actually is because it’s surrounded by dark squares, while the one outside the shadow looks darker because it’s surrounded by light squares. Also, since our brains know that one square is in the shadow, we may imagine it lighter because we’re thinking of what it would look like without the shadow.
5. Colors Appear in a Different Brightness Depending on Surrounding Hues
Nearby colors and patterns easily alter our perception of brightness. This concept is used in many optical illusions, including the checker shadow illusion mentioned above. This image shows White’s Illusion, which follows a similar idea to Adelson’s Check-Shadow Illusion. The graphic on the left is the original one, which shows gray rectangles layered on white and black stripes.
In the left image, the gray rectangles are the same hue on both the black and white stripes. However, the ones on the black stripes look lighter than the ones on the white stripes. Like many other optical illusions, our brains are tricking us into seeing two different colors because the color is surrounded by lighter or darker hues. When the rectangle is on a dark strip, our brains adjust it to look lighter, while the opposite is true for the lighter strips.
The image on the right proves that all the gray rectangles are the same hue by moving them to the middle and having them overlap. With the rectangles touching, it’s easy to see that they’re the exact same color. Yet, even knowing this doesn’t stop us from perceiving different colors in the first image.
6. Dots on Optical Illusions Seemingly Appear and Disappear
Dots can add a lot of confusion to illusions. There are several types of illusions that focus on dots appearing and disappearing from patterns. The two images above are examples of the Hermann grid illusion and the scintillating grid illusion.
The Hermann grid illusion (on the left) makes faded gray circles appear where the white lines intersect. When you look directly at one of the intersections, the gray blob will disappear, but you will still see the gray blobs in the intersections that you’re not looking directly at.
The scintillating grid illusion follows a similar design, but it has gray lines with white circles in the middle of each intersection. When looking at this illusion, black dots seem to quickly appear and disappear in the white circles. Like the Hermann grid illusion, if you stare directly at one intersection, the black dot disappears from that spot. In this image, the dark spots also disappear if you look at it very closely or from very far away.
There’s another similar illusion. It has a bunch of gray lines going vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. Some of the intersections have a black dot in the center. If you look at one of the black dots directly, the rest seem to disappear from your peripheral vision. It’s likely due to the fact that our peripheral vision is nowhere near as strong as our vision when looking directly at an object.
7. Some Images Stay in Our Vision Even After We Look Away
Afterimages, also known as aftereffects, are illusions that happen more often than we realize. It occurs whenever something stays visible even after you’re no longer looking at it, such as when a camera flash remains in your sight for a few seconds. The same can happen with images. If you stare at certain images for a while, you’ll see a faded version of that picture even after you look away.
A unique version of this illusion is negative afterimages. Negative afterimages have the opposite colors of what a photo would normally have. If you look at them for about half a minute and look away, you’ll usually see the image for a moment in its original colors. Use the image above as an example. Even though the woman appears blue, black, and white in the photo, when you look away, you may be able to see her natural hair and skin color.
Negative afterimages occur when your eyes become overstimulated after looking at a photo for too long. They may lose sensitivity, causing them to produce a negative afterimage as a result. So, when you look away, you see an inverted version of the image instead of the one you were looking at.
8. The Size and Color of Shapes Could Alter Perceived Sizes
The size of objects can confuse our brains just like colors and patterns can. The above image is the Ebbinghaus Illusion, which makes circles seem of different sizes. Of course, the green circles are much larger in the left image than they are in the right one. However, the red circle in the center is always the same size.
The red circle looks much smaller in the first image because it’s being compared to the large green circles surrounding it. If you look at the bottom of this image, lines are added to prove that the two red circles are exactly the same. Just like how surrounding colors can confuse our brains, shapes of varying sizes can have a similar effect.
