Staring At This Optical Illusion For 30 Seconds Will Make You Hallucinate
Don't believe your lying eyes.
jessicahyde / Getty Images, HarryKao, capturenow via Canva If you have never seen an optical illusion, it is an image that makes you see things different than they actually are.
Optical illusions trick your eyes into believing you see something that is not really there. Some work and others are pretty questionable.
But there's one optical illusion that literally changes the way you see things around you.
Staring at this optical illusion for 30 seconds will cause you to hallucinate.
TikToker Sean Andrew shared an optical illusion that actually causes you to question everything around you once you look away.
The clip is just 36 seconds long and asks viewers to stare at a red dot in the center of a pattern of black and white diamond shapes.
The rhombus shapes are divided into four quadrants with the innermost patterns moving toward the center, while the outside shapes appear to be moving outward.
Andrew instructs you to watch the red dot until the video ends, clearing your head of all thoughts if possible.
As you keep your eyes focused on the dot in the middle of the screen, the lines around it start to become blurry and morph in size slightly.
Once the video concludes, you are instructed to look up from your phone (or device) and take a peek around the room.
If you did the exercise properly, you will notice that everything around you is either blurry or appears to be expanding and contracting in size.
Reading text might really trip you out as the words grow and shrink randomly right before your eyes.
Why does this optical illusion make you hallucinate?
Optical illusions work when our brains try to communicate with our eyes (or vice versa) to simplify what we are witnessing but send mixed messages.
The eyes might perceive something to be moving and send that signal to the brain, while the brain is "seeing" the opposite.
In the optical illusion above, the movement of the diamond shape causes objects to grow and shrink in all directions after we look away.
Information goes through a long, complex journey in milliseconds as it travels from our line of sight to our brain. Along the way, there might be confusion or second-guessing that happens, causing things to morph as we try and figure out what to believe.
Light is also a factor in our interpretation. It bounces off of things and enters our eye, where it transforms into electrical impulses that create images in our brains.
When the light in an object is moving, in this instance the black lines versus the white ones, we have difficulty focusing on more than one thing at once. So, our brains try to focus on what is important.
Another reason optical illusions occur is the changing size of the lines that make them appear to be coming toward us or moving away.
TikToker Jay Cook shares another optical illusion using a blue eye as the point of focus:
Because the lines in this video are moving towards the top and bottom of the screen, once you look away, you will notice that everything in the room stretches, getting taller and shorter as you watch.
Generally speaking, whatever you perceive to happen to the lines or shapes within an optical illusion will be mimicked by other objects when you look at them.
NyRee Ausler is a writer from Seattle, Washington, and author of seven books. She covers lifestyle and entertainment and news, as well as navigating the workplace and social issues.