The best illusion of the year

Start the video and concentrate your vision on the white dot in the middle of the screen. Do the colors stop changing when the dots begin to rotate? They don’t, but it appears they do. Apparently the spinning motion suppresses the viewer’s ability to detect the changes.

The official name for this illusion is “Silencing awareness of change by background motion” and on Monday it was named the best illusion of the year at a contest for this sort of thing in Naples, Fla.