This fun optical illusion will make you see a black and white image in color

I’ve always found optical illusions fun and intriguing. In fact, I like them so much that I visited the Museum of Illusions three times. In this video, Andrew Steele shares an interesting black and white optical illusion that tricks your brain into seeing a B&W photo in color. Of course, I tried it. It works, and it’s really trippy. Take a look at the video below and see for yourself.

When I read the video description, I thought that the illusion would be something like this. But the one Andrew shows is ephemeral. It’s only there until you look away or blink. But it’s so realistic and vivid! The trick involves staring into a black dot in the center of a strange, color-shifted image. After a few seconds, the image switches to its black and white version, and suddenly, you see it in full color—except it’s not. It’s just your brain doing its thing.

The illusion is based on chromatic adaptation. It’s basically the white balance of your brain if I can call it that way. In other words, it’s your brain’s ability to keep the colors of the scene constant even when the lighting changes. Andrew gives a handy example: he is holding a white paper in the shadow during golden hour. While color sampling of the paper shows it in blueish and orangey tones, your brain will always know that it’s white.

Another fun thing about this optical illusion is that you can make it yourself. Take a color image and adjust the hue so that the colors are shifted to their complementary color. Then, crank up the saturation all the way up. Slap a dot in the middle to help the eyes stay in one place. That’s your first photo. For the second photo, just desaturate the original color image. You can make a gif out of them, and here’s my example:

Here’s the original image for comparison. Did you see the same colors when the black and white optical illusion flashed by?

[My favourite optical illusion via PetaPixel]