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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

Focus on the gray, and let your mind put it as the foreground, and circles, let them be a low frequency background. It may be your best chance to not see the illusion.

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I also think that as you become more trained in graphics (and illusions in general?) you become more adept at stripping the component that makes up the illusion.

Also the challenge that comes with "Warning!! You cannot unsee this!!!" probably helps too.

Worked for me on the squared circle but took concentration on the spiral. It changed as I looked at it but not like before. Different ways of focusing on it made it go static vs moving.

What made you recommend that?

Negative space is easy to see when you focus on it. In these examples, the negative space is flat color, so it's not affected by the illusion.

Good advice.

You feel it, it's almost there... and no. It's gone. The spiral won.

So close !

I do better on the spiral one when I imagine I am slowly floating down a tunnel, like a game of Luxuria Superbia. I can see an individual circle or two pop out at a time, except for the smallest ones :/.

And after sleeping on it it is much easier now :/.

It could be said that his explanations of the illusions are wrong: there is a spiral in the final image, it's just masked out by concentric circle outlines. Particularly toward the center of the image where the resolution is so low that it all blurs together anyway it is hard to argue that is not a genuine (if blurry) spiral.

When learning to parse the concentric circles with eighteen patches of mirror-spiraling dot sequences, my thought was: "Look at the gray areas, duh. Just like life. They're what's actually there, the rest is a distraction designed to deceive your natural perception." > woah.jpg

I had no problem seeing circles and not a spiral. If I stare at it, it sort of looks like a tunnel deep into the ground.

Just kind of look at the whole thing and then the details, alternate your attention back and forth and you can see circles and not a spiral.

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