Optical illusion: Only those with sharp vision can spot the hidden ‘3’ in a sea full of golden identical numbers – The Times of India

Optical illusions have long been considered great mental adventures, and there’s no doubt this one you will be exercising your brain considerably while trying to make sense of how it happened. At first sight, the image could be seen as a perfectly structured grid, but it’s all filled with golden, balloon-like symbols, seemingly like “8” and “0”. It is beautifully arranged and a pleasure to view, but when you really study it, you’ll find there is a sly “3” concealed within the artwork.
This will be a game of good observation skills that will help one catch the secret number. Others will not have that luck while others will; your brain can trick you in this case into believing everything inside the picture looks uniform because your brain is attuned to notice patterns easily. This is known as “perceptual grouping,” a mental shortcut that helps us make sense of our environment by focusing on repeated features and ignoring minor variations. In this case, our minds are led to believe that all the symbols in the image are identical, which makes detecting the outlier much more challenging.
The design is very clever as it takes advantage of our pattern recognition and the ability to pick out shapes quickly. Most of the symbols are the same, so the “3” looks like the others. The difference in shape and form isn’t immediately noticeable to the naked eye. The setting is made worse by the golden glow and metallic shimmer of the symbols, which bring a reflective quality into the scene, taking away attention from the odd man out.
If you can’t find it, look for it in the lower right corner of the picture. The “3” is shaped uniquely, with a curve that stands out from the other numbers. Once you see it, you can’t help but notice it, but until then, it’s hard to find.
How long did it take you to find the secret “3”? Sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest to see!