Try To Find The 12 Dots In This Grid And You'll Swear You're Hallucinating

This is trippy.
Jacque Ninio

You’ll feel like you need an eye exam after you study this optical illusion.

It’s officially called Ninio’s extinction illusion, and it features a grid of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines with 12 black dots scattered throughout.

Viewers are then supposed to see if they can spot all 12 dots at once.

Spoiler alert: It’s pretty nigh impossible.

French scientist Jacque Ninio created the illusion back in 2000, but it went viral this past weekend after Japanese psychology professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka posted it on Facebook.

It hasn’t reached the viral heights of “the dress,” but it has been shared more than 11,000 times as of Monday.

How does it work? Ninio said the brain isn’t always able to accurately process everything in a particularly arranged pattern, according to the BBC.

“When the white disks in a scintillating grid are reduced in size, and outlined in black, they tend to disappear. One sees only a few of them at a time, in clusters which move erratically on the page.

“Where they are not seen, the grey alleys seem to be continuous, generating grey crossings that are not actually present.

“Some black sparkling can be seen at those crossings where no disk is seen. The illusion also works in reverse contrast.”

Take a look above and see if you can see all the dots at once. Or you can do what this guy did and simply doctor the grid so that all the black dots show up clearly.

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