This perplexing optical illusion has my brain in check mate

We love a good trick of the eye here at Creative Bloq. Our pick of the best optical illusions includes everything from Super Mario confusing us on a staircase to a spinning horse. But some mind benders still just leave me stumped, and this is one of them.

The checker shadow illusion is a famous optical illusion that's been intriguing scientists for years. But I have to admit that I suspected a fast one when I first came across it. We're told that Square A and square B in the illustration below are exactly the same shade of grey. How can that be?

I'm familiar with the effect of contrast illusions, and we've covered lots of them before. They cause areas of identical colour to look different depending on the surrounding context. In this example, we presume that square B will be lighter than A because we know what chequerboards and chessboards look like, and we see that B is lighter than the squares immediately beside it vertically and horizontally. The illustration below proves that the two squares are indeed the same colour by linking them together.

But I still had doubts because when I tried to isolate the two individual squares by covering the rest of the composition, square B still looks lighter than square A to me. So I pulled the image into Photoshop (yes, I was that determined to prove the illusion wrong). But a quick check with the eye dropper tool proved that the two squares are indeed identical in hue. So I surrender. Check and mate. The optical illusion is real.

You can learn more about the illusion in this 2020 scientific paper from Masahiro Yamamoto and Shinsuke Shimojo. In the meantime, don't miss the weird AI optical illusions that are amazing the internet.

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Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.