Fading Out
Six soft patches of colour around a cross. Stare at the cross and see what becomes of them.
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So geht’s
Keep your eyes on the cross
For twenty seconds, look only at the small cross in the middle and keep your eyes as still as you can. Watch the coloured patches without looking at them.
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What does not change stops being seen
The patches never changed. The visual system mostly reports change; something that stays exactly the same on the same part of the retina gradually stops being reported. Tiny involuntary eye movements usually refresh an image — but a patch with soft edges, away from where you are looking, hardly changes when the eye jiggles, so it fades into the grey around it.
Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, a Swiss physician and philosopher, described the fading in 1804. Move your eyes and everything comes straight back.