Keep your eyes locked on the flickering green dot in the middle. Give it a few seconds and the yellow dots will start to vanish, one, two, or all three at once.
What: Three big, bright yellow dots. Not faint, not tiny, not hiding. And yet, stare at the middle for a few seconds and they just… leave. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, sometimes all three at once. This one was found by Yoram Bonneh, Alexander Cooperman and Dov Sagi at the Weizmann Institute in 2001 [1]. Their original version was a swarm of blue dots spinning on a 3D sphere, but the spinning grid with the flashing green dot is the one that took over the internet, and honestly it’s the better one.
How To: Lock your eyes on the green dot in the middle and don’t move them. For me it kicks in within about 10 seconds. The dots will come back on their own, usually with a little “pop”, or instantly if you blink or glance away. Try setting the rotation speed to 0, the whole thing pretty much dies. Smaller dots vanish easier too, so shrink them down if you’re having trouble.
Explain It: Honestly, nobody’s totally sure, and there are a bunch of competing ideas. The one I like best: your brain sees a dot that stays perfectly still while everything around it moves, decides that can’t be real, and assumes it’s a smudge or a flaw in your eye (kind of like your blind spot). So it edits it out. Another idea is that the moving grid hogs all your attention and the poor static dots just lose the fight. Either way, it’s a close cousin of the Troxler Fade, your brain is filling in the gap with the stuff around it.
Fun fact: researchers reckon this could happen while driving at night, with the tail light of the car in front blinking out while you’re watching the traffic around it. Yikes.
I've researched these optical illusions in my spare time but am clearly not any kind of expert and my explainations are pretty smooth brained, if you find something mis-cited, earlier examples, or general mistakes please new let me know via toymaker@toms.toys, be kind!