This illusion above was created by Jeremy Hinton and put onto the web by Michael Bach (of Silhouette Illusion fame). If you stare at the black dot in the center, the colors surrounding it will eventually appear to fade into the background. An extensive explanation as well as additional examples can be found here.
When a blurry stimulus is presented to a region of the visual field away from where we are fixating, and we keep our eyes still, that stimulus will disappear even though it is still physically presented. This is called Troxler’s fading. It occurs because although our eyes move a little when we are fixating a point, away from that point (in peripheral vision) the movements are not large enough to shift the lilac disks to new neurons of the visual system.
