The peripheral drift illusion causes colorful magenta dots to appear larger or shift outward as you move your eyes from one dot to the next. While this illusion can be seen in various patterns, it is most noticeable in circular designs, like the one above. First described by Jocelyn Faubert and Andrew Herbert in 1999, the illusion is more pronounced during eye movements or blinking.
Faubert and Herbert suggested that this illusion arises from a mix of factors, including eye motion, variations in light intensity, and the way our eyes perceive depth.
The scintillating grid illusion is a visual trick that can be quite perplexing. When you focus on the white circles at the intersections of the grid’s connecting lines, black dots appear and vanish rapidly in other parts of the grid. The speed at which these dots form is what gives the illusion its name.
Though it was developed relatively recently, the scintillating grid is based on a similar illusion from 1870, known as the Hermann grid illusion, discovered by Ludimar Hermann.
