By on October 25, 2006, with 125 Comments

Can you do me a favour? If you are using our Optical Illusion of the Day Gadget or Mac Widget, can you please make a screenshot of it (with full desktop) and mail it to us, so we can include them inside our one of next posts (use “printscreen” and paste it into photoshop, paint or any other image editing tool, and save as JPG). You can send your screenshots to this email adress: vurdlak@gmail.com. Now let’s go on with today’s new illusion:

This came in one of those forwarding emails, lot of us usually consider spam. Well, this submission by Bruno David Rodrigues actually intrigued me, since it works so well! It’s pretty old stuff, but classic optical illusion I never previously posted on this site! Open the article to find answers and another test inside! After that, be sure to check previous classics: Double Meanings, Brain is a Genius, Missing Piece, Stroop Effect and Left-Right Brain magic trick. If you like Optical Illusion Tests, be sure to check appropriate existing category full of them!

Read out loud the text inside the triangle below:

It’s more than likely you said, “A bird in the bush”. If this IS what YOU said, then you failed to see that the word THE is repeated twice inside this triangle! Sorry, look again :) and try to post your explanation. There is something worng with our brains, I think. Another example is this sentance:

Count every ‘F‘ in the following text:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…

How many F‘s did you count? Wrong! There are six of them above – no joke. Now read it again with more precision. Really, go back and try to find all the six F‘s before you continue to read this explanation. The reasoning is really intersting.

The answer is that the brain cannot process word “of”. Do you think it is incredible or what? Now go back and look again! The truth is that anyone who counts all the F‘s on the first go, must be a true genius :) If you’re first answer was three, that is quite normal, if your answer was four that’s quite rare. If you found this amuzing, send it to your friends. It will drive them crazy.
And keep them occupied for several minutes!

Comments

125 Responses
  1. ItWasntMe says:

    Haha this is awesome! xD

  2. Factual says:

    The ones that count them all are slow readers. The ones that read fast (skim) are more literate. Genius my @ss

  3. Eva : D says:

    haha, i only got 3 f’s : D
    - of course i’ve got 6 now, but i had to read it a few times [:

  4. Wolfman2200 says:

    I got the six Fs the first time. (I am considered a genius.) So that much seems to hold true.

  5. unknown says:

    i got 4 on the first round because i was trying to find an ‘f’ in every line, and that’s how i ended up with spotting the extra ‘f’ in the last line’s ‘of’

  6. m says:

    i got both the first time!!!

  7. Daniel says:

    your not stupid if you cant read the two “thes” its just that we are not needed to read even all the words in a sentence to understand or read every letter in a word to see what it is for example:

    hye whts up hwo are yuo

  8. Caroline says:

    Whoa, that’s so weird! I was so careful counting them!

  9. coolez says:

    already see that in the movie i was XO COOL i would give this a thumbs UP :D

  10. Kyle says:

    The first time i only counted 3
    Then they told me that their was 6 so i went back and counted again, once again only counted 3.
    I had to read the solution before i finally managed to get all 6.

  11. Ella says:

    The f-thing was simple. I saw all 6 of them at once, but I failed the “The”-thing.

  12. St. Mr. Mrs. Dr. Smart Man Person says:

    It isn’t that your brain can not process the word “of” if that were the case your brain would be incapable a determining the difference between “of” and “climactic”. It’s just that on the first try you were probably reading quickly. So your brain didn’t have time to process the “f” in “of” it accentually skipped checking most of the short words so as to keep up with your reading.

    (

  13. Matthew says:

    Its in the ofs people

  14. Annishia says:

    I FAILED EVERYTHING!!!! i found 3 fs, and then i read the explanation, read the sentences AGAIN and still couldnt find them all!!!!!! then my 6 year old brother came up and was like what are you doing??? and i showed him… he found all 6 fs and noticed the bird in the the bush the first time!!!! shoud i be happy i have a genius brother?!!!

  15. Michael says:

    I counted 5 at the start :)

  16. Erin says:

    I got 6 F’s so im not WRONG!

  17. Someone says:

    I got 4 f’s on the first try. And saw the the’s twice. Maybe because I’ve seen it before.

  18. Luis says:

    i counted 6 on my first go! but my mother language is not english so…that might had some influence

  19. alex says:

    how luis says, this trick don´t work with peoples with another native language…the reason is: our brain don´t read every letter but recognize the word.By the fact we have another native language forces our brain to read all letters.

  20. Thats what she says:

    lol! u spelled wrong wrong! you spelled it ‘worng’ anyways, i got 6 fs and i read the twice! can someone tell me how this is an illusion?!?!?!

  21. Thats what she says:

    oh and sentence! it doesn’t have a “a” in it! my 7 yr old pointed that out!!

  22. Thats what she says:

    interesting and amusing!lol!! tell me, where are the zees in amusing!??

  23. Simon says:

    Omg first time 4 yes, second time 5
    and that was saying each letter and counting the f’s :|

  24. Mr.Amazed says:

    i read the bird in the bush but when i scrolled down i realized

  25. Federico says:

    How many of you noticed “worng” instead of “wrong”? This is actually another kind of optical illusion!

  26. Abraham says:

    I got 5 F the first run, got really mad because the second time I got 3,

    • Noah says:

      Yeah, I also got five the first time, but only 3 the 2nd. I was like, “how the hell did I get 5 before?”

  27. i came here from the link of todays post (martin luther knig jr. qoute), and i got 6 in the first count, i started counting, saw an “of”, then went back and recounted all the ‘f”s carefully, so maybe second i guess

  28. Rhialto says:

    “If you’re first answer” – must be “your”. This seems to be an extremely common problem for native English speakers.

    (oh and your email address validity checker is incorrect. “Blah ” is a correct address)

    • Rhialto says:

      (and your formatter is incorrect too – it deleted part of the email address I gave above. Let’s try again: “Blah <foo@bar.baz> is a valid email address)

  29. Ccrossed says:

    Ctrl+F FTW!!!

  30. Soendoro Soetanto says:

    Amazing…. really amazing.

  31. ACHMED says:

    honest to god i found all the “f’s” in the firs try and i read it properly.!

  32. Wayne says:

    Of course you brain can process the word “of.” That’s just stupid.

    Note how the words are broken up so three “F’s” are the first letters. Easy for your brain to spot. Now you look at ONLY first letter of each word.

    If they hadn’t broken up the words so strangely, you would have got them all. It’s got nothing to do with the word “OF” or your brain’s “inability to ‘process’” it.

    Sheesh. You people will believe anything you read on the internet.

  33. AzISeeIt says:

    The double-”the”, the missing “F”s, even (as someone pointed out) the “worng” all happen for the same reason: we tend to scan when we read, rather than going one word at a time. Short common words like “of” and “the” tend to get glossed over and dismissed.
    You register the “of” functionally, but not really as a word, so you miss that “F”.
    The first “the” is registered and dismissed, so when the same thing happens at the start of the next line, the first one isn’t still there to get “bumped into”, so to speak. But write it out in a single line and you spot the anomaly right away because it doesn’t scan properly.
    Even with the mis-spelled “worng”, you can tell easily from context what the word should be, and a kind of built-in automatic SpellCheck (is that how it’s spelled? I’ve never really noticed) corrects it for you. I remember reading something to the effect that, as long as the first and last letters of each word in a sentence (or sentance, for that matter) are correct, you can screw up the other letters mightily and people will still be able to understand it.
    How cool are our brains?

    Or, maybe it’s just that the letters on my monitor keep mysteriously getting smaller all the time. Where are my glasses?

  34. Nirvana says:

    Why does it say ‘the’ 2 times

  35. kate says:

    WHAT THE CRAP!?!?!?!?!?!!? WHERE DID THE ‘OF’S COME FROM?!?!?

  36. Valerie says:

    Awesome I got six the first time around. Those ofs sure are tricky

  37. Bernie says:

    I have never seen this before and yet I must be ‘a true genius’. I read it as a bird in the the bush and counted 6 F’s first time. I really am not a genius, I just have, as many have indeed told me, amazing attention to detail.

  38. Mcfly11 says:

    u spelt wrong wrong.

  39. steve says:

    i counted 3, my 11 yr old son counted 6 first try lol must be why he has a superior IQ

Speak Your Mind

You can add some images too.