Originally published at: The bizarre "scintillating grid illusion" | Boing Boing
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That’s actually kinda hard to look at. Fascinating, but uncomfortable.
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It only works for me when I zoom in. When it’s small on my iPhone I only see white dots
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It’s the same as the reverse-Jesus illusion. The white burns into your eye circuits and when your eyes move, the contrasting image stays imprinted.
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I thought the dots were blue and gold. 
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This also works as a magic-eye-type-autostereogram-recedes-into-screen-white-black-dot illusion.
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Kinda exactly like presbyopia while not being that is nice. Visual cortex fren.
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It appears that vision researchers are unable to explain this optical illusion. From which I infer that, no, it’s not explained by persistent vision.
Edit: The Discussion in this 1997 paper hints at the complexity of this optical illusion. See The Scintillating Grid Illusion - ScienceDirect.
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I suspect that like the straight/curved grid illusion it has something to do with the different way that your brain processes the high-res vision in your fovea and low-res signal compression that it does for the rest of your vision. The straight/curved grid had to do with the lack of color outside of your central vision but my odds on guess is that at some level this is due to the “signal compression” that occurs out of your central vision.
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Interesting. When I was considering entering a Computation and Neural Systems program (30 years ago), they mistaught me that this effect is due to nearby optical neurons fighting each other, and the ones at the crossings getting hit 4 ways rather than 2. But the Wikipedia page explains why that doesn’t hold water. Integrating this concept into cameras is what has gotten us HDR, which was just getting started at the time, so even if the theory’s wrong it’s had a big win.
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