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What: The Healing Grid illusion is an optical illusion created by Scientist Ryota Kanai. It was a finalist in the 2005 illusion of the year competition, featuring this kind of peripheral deception.

How To: To make this illusion occur, you need to stare at the center. Be careful not to look too much into your peripheral vision. Eventually, there will be a slight mending of the grid. The effect isn't extremely strong and may take some time. I've noticed that once I get it to "heal" once, I can reproduce it quite quickly afterwards. There are several options that might make the effect seem stronger for you. Reducing the variance means there will be less "break", which will, so to speak, make it a bit easier for your brain to "heal" it. The colors can also be helpful in enhancing the effect. For me, the higher the contrast, the stronger the effect. You can also intensify the Healing Grid illusion by changing the sizes of the squares or plus symbols (depending on your perspective). The smaller they are, the stronger the effect.

Explain it: This optical illusion belongs to a similar category as a few others on the site. When you focus on a small part of a larger image, your brain and optical nerves start to get tired and begin to make some assumptions about the periphery. According to the paper: We claim that the uniformity illusion results from a reconstruction of sparse visual information (from the periphery) based on more easily accessible detailed visual information (from the fovea), which leads to a rich but illusory experience of peripheral vision.