Test your brain: Do you see a wavy line or a zigzag?
An optical illusion called the “Curvature Blindness” promises to be the latest illusion to blow you mind.
Despite what your eye might tell you, in the image below all the lines are exactly the same.
According to the people who discovered it, the phenomenon has never been previously reported.
In a recent edition of the journal i-Perception, Japanese cognition and illusion researcher Kohske Takahashi provided a scientific analysis of the optical illusion.
“Here, we report a novel illusion —— Curvature Blindness Illusion —— that will provide novel implications for contour perception, in particular, for the underlying mechanisms of curve and corner perception,” Mr Takahashi wrote.
In other words, our eyes can be tricked into seeing a wavy line as a zigzag line depending on the colour scheme of the line and the background.
In this optical illusion, the lines on the grey background appear to be in a zigzag pattern, as our brains are tricked into imagining a corner.
“Physically, however, all lines are wavy lines with an identical shape; there is no triangular wave and hence there is no corner,” Mr Takahashi said.
“Despite the simplicity and effect magnitudes, to the best of our knowledge, no one has reported about this phenomenon.”