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Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm that the gif only has two flashes, although the second one appears to be two frames long.

That is the whole point of the illusion, that there are two filled circles that flash and your brain perceives it as 3 flashes because they come so fast that they are processed as a temporal chunk before you become aware of it.

No, that isn't it, re-read the article. The illusion is supposed to be that three flashes that are not evenly spaced, or are even spaced out of order (1--3-2) get perceived by the brain as evenly-spaced an in order.

Look at the explanatory diagram with the labels "What our eyes see" and "What our brain "sees"" (the third image on the page).

The gif is just broken. It's supposed to have a space between the second and third flashes.

Yes I see the last one was supposed to flash twice, but at 2 positions. The explanation is the same though as far as I understood the article, that the brain processes all flashes as a single temporal chunk and that is what causes the temporal re-alignment. It kind of resembles the famous letter-jumbling where you can still read the text if you re-arrange the letters inside the words if you read fast enough.

> That is the whole point of the illusion, that there are two filled circles that flash and your brain perceives it as 3 flashes

Where is this from?

I could be missing something, but everything I can see in the article and the abstract of the paper indicates that the point of the illusion is that showing three flashes causes us to misplace the second flash as being located at the midpoint of the first and second.

Yeah it's supposed to be two flash positions only, but I missed that the last one is supposed to flash twice which it apparently doesn't in the gif so that was the confusion.

Seems like that's not the same illusion - there are multiple closely related illusions here.

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