It May Be Impossible To See All The Dots In This Puzzle At Once

Some of the most maddening puzzles are the simplest. After all, it's no surprise that all but a select few would fail at a puzzle with 140 levels that requires an intimate knowledge of computers, trivia, and "remote viewing," whatever that is. Yet, when you're only being asked to look at a few dots, it seems so beyond belief that it doesn't work for you.

Many people, including myself, remember getting this sort of feeling when trying to find the hidden image in those Magic Eye pictures back in the '90s. Today, however, we're looking at something different.

That's because what we're looking at today isn't a puzzle at all. It's actually a very subtle optical illusion — and we're going to tell you how it works.

COMMENT and let us know if you're one of the rare few that can defy the odds.

As I've said, the task at hand seems simple.

Inside this grid are 12 black dots. All you have to do is see them all at once.

As you look at it, the picture seems to shift and change.

And so it becomes a low-key version of those trippy gifs you might come across. From that, you might have guessed that it never totally displays all 12 at once, so that's why you can't see them.

But what if I told you that the image never moved at all?

Even as they seem to disappear, all 12 dots have stayed put the entire time.

With this in mind, most people started looking in earnest.

Whether they put some distance between them and the picture or tried looking at it from different angles, they were determined to see all 12 dots at once.

Yet, there's a special reason why you may only give yourself a headache if you do this.

In all likelihood, you'll never be able to see all 12 dots.

That's because the image was specially designed to make the task impossible. 

Called the "Extinction Illusion," this image was designed by French scientist Jacques Ninio.

He made the illusion to show that when the eye seems a particular pattern, the brain will not be able to process it accurately. We can't see all 12 dots because our brains simply won't let us.

So how did he do it?

The illusion starts with the pattern of the grid itself. When these "disks" are outlined in black and shrunk down to size, it becomes hard to make out more than a few of them at once. Where these grids cross, the eye can pick out some black "sparkling" that doesn't actually exist.

What Ninio has done is reverse the effect so the dots disappear instead of the disks.

The key is in these gray lines that form a series of little "alleys." These alleys seem to keep going even beyond where we can see them, so the brain fills in the points where they cross without including the dots.

Unless we're looking right at them, the dots disappear.

The pattern keeps us from focusing on all the dots at once, which is why we can't see them no matter how hard we try.

One person did come forward and claimed to see them all.

However, he doctored the image and recolored the lines of the grid. With more contrast, the dots stand out better and seeing them all isn't much of a challenge.

So far, that seems to be the only way to see them all.

Don't forget to COMMENTand let us know what you went through trying to see all these dots.