TEST YOUR PERCEPTION - TRY A CLASSIC FLICKER EXPERIMENT
CHANGE BLINDNESS

TAKE THE TEST
See if you can spot the difference between the flickering images

DID YOU SPOT THE DIFFERENCE?
This version has no gray frames in between the images.
The difference is obvious.

Try more tests like this:
MIETTE
GEORGIAN BAY
NANTON

back to The Brain Cafe Menu

What is going on?

Once you've seen the difference, you can't NOT see it, even if you go back to the first animation. Why is it so much harder to see the change in the first animation? The short answer is that your brain was on auto pilot.  Our brains are wired to notice motion. Motion signals a change. But when something interrupts the motion signals, like the gray frame between the images in the animation, it blinds us to the change. Why? No one knows for sure, but it might be because our visual memory is very short. The gray frame swamps it and more or less wipes out whatever we saw a fraction of a second earlier. To see the changes in the first animation, you have to switch from auto pilot to actively hunting with your attention. Even then, unless you happen to be looking at exactly the spot where the image changes, you’re blind to the change. When the gray frame isn’t there to swamp our perception, the difference is easy to spot.

WARNING:
If you have photosensitive epilepsy, or think you might, do not attempt these flicker experiments.
They are not flickering at a rate known to induce seizures, but your results may vary.