The new illusion looks simple, showing intersecting grey lines on a white background. But looking closely starts it moving – and though there are actually 12 black dots in it, it’s only ...

And with this regular pattern of gray lines on a white background, the brain guesses that there’ll just be more of the same, missing the intermittent black dots. Those dots disappear and ...

The latest visual trick making the rounds is an image of intersecting grey lines against a white background, with 12 black dots on the nodes where the grey lines meet. All 12 dots are really on ...

So when we stare at a black dot surrounded by a pattern of gray lines against a white background, our mind assumes what the intersection of the gray lines will look like without adding a black dot ...

As The Verge’s Rachel Becker writes: "And with this regular pattern of gray lines on a white background, the brain guesses that there’ll just be more of the same, missing the intermittent black dots." ...

featuring gray crisscrosses on a white background, with twelve black dots scattered throughout. But there’s no way you’ll see all the dots at once. The image above comes from a 2000 study on ...

So white spots on a black background look bigger than same-sized black spots on white background, and Galileo's glowing stellar objects are not really as big as they might appear to the unaided eye.