Eye to Brain Coordination

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!

137 Replies to “Eye to Brain Coordination”

  1. Bah, 5 out of six “F”s. I caught most of the “of”s, but started to slack off at the end. The trick to that is don’t read it as words- whenever counting letters, ignore the gestalt.

  2. Pople read words as a whole, not the individual letters. Because “of” is so short, it would be subconsiously be thought of as a single sound, not a word. That’s why you can say “I cnat bielvee taht i cluod raed tihs sneetcne!” and interprite it as I can’t believe that I could read this sentence!” I got all 6 “F”s. *Smug* With the first one, you are so used to NOT having repeated words that you ignore the second one.

  3. It’s only that i read the answer that i counted 6 “F”s otherwise i would still count 3 “F”s its amazing !!!

  4. Try these with a six year old that is just learning to read, they’ll pick out the errors with no problem…reading isn’t automatic yet for them so they pay much more deliberate attention to what they are reading.

  5. I got them both right away….but I have seen them before so I guess it doesn’t really count as me being genius.

  6. Ha! Six “F”s on the first try and I read both “the”s in the first one! Of course, I love these types of brainteasers, so I’ve done them both before. ;) More of these, please!

  7. I’m Italian (excuse me for my english).
    I had counted 6 F, it’s intersting because english is not my native language.

  8. with the triangle, our brains are not programmed to see the 2 ‘the’s. We are taught that grammatically there should only be 1 ‘the’ in the sentence so that is what we read. You may find that someone who speaks very little english would see both.

    The same goes for the ‘f’s
    When we read the word of we pronouce is ov, and therefore see no f. We also say thought and see fought.

    They both come down to the way we were taught.

  9. DAMN IT 5 fs couldof gotten more atually i shouldve gotten 6 ive allready done this trick some where else but i still only got 5!!!!! in the words of scrooge mcduck BAH HUMBUG

  10. I got them right 1st time! R head teacher made us do it in assembily
    wen u sed
    “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:”
    were you meant to spell wrong like this: worng

  11. Man, that is freakin’ hilarious. I showed my roomate the bird one and he just kept saying “bird in the bush, bird in the bush, what’s the point?” until I showed him. Awesome.

  12. Alright – you said 3 f’s is normal 4 f’s is rare. I got 4 f’s … twice! What’s wrong with me???

  13. ya, both of these were way too easy, i still do not understand how it is hard to find 6 F’s in something, nor how it is difficult to tell there are two “the’s” in the first.

  14. I am doing a science experiment on this illusion and i was wondering if anyone knew the original website or where I can find more information about this illusion.

  15. i would just like to say that i got 6 out of 6 f’s!!
    it might be because i’ve done that sort of thing before so i was very careful about reading all the f’s.
    with the bird in the bush one though i only noticed the extra the when i read the explanation and then it seemed really obvious… strange and cool :D

  16. Well, the first didn’t work… maybe it’s because English isn’t my native language, so I had to think too much ^_^

    But the Second… HAHA, counted 4 Fs, i’m rare +happy+

  17. I did count six “F” – but I’m not an english natural speaker. I think that’s it! If a language is not the mother-tongue, you see the words more precisely…
    But – a great article!
    (I’ll search for an pendant for the german language…)

    I hope you could understand what I did mean… :o)

  18. There is nothing wrong with are brains, if anything, the triangle shows its brilliance. I minds merely tallied the error and corrected it without us thinking about it. Its not us “noticing” the problem, its our brains using its visual memory to correct the problem.

  19. hahahh thats great!
    i love the 2nd one!
    ive seen the 1st one before but not the 2nd one.

    any reason why the line breaks are in between words?
    does that affect anything??

    please respond if you know vurdlak :)
    btw..what country do you live in? or whats your nationality?

  20. Strangely. I got them both right on the first try,
    I counted 6 F’s and I said the word The twice.

    Anyone care to explain?

  21. i got all 6 f’s on the first try. i m a true genius. lol. just kidding. i did that one b4. as for theother on ei read “a bird in the bush” even thouhg i realized later that i had done that one before too. me dumb. lol

  22. thats cool the reasion it dose that is because our brain see the biger pic in this situation a university stuby explines that the hunan brain sees the whule word instead of the induviudual leffers as you con probably read this with littel to no probjems same applys to sentences you read the sentence not the induvidual words

  23. They used these in the Optical Illusions Test, too. Once I finished that, I knew the answer to both of them. (That exact same paragraph (second one and first one, except with the first one, it’s a different saying) is in the Optical Illusions Test.) :)

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

  25. 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’

  26. 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

  27. 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.

  28. 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.

    (

  29. 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?!!!

  30. 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.

  31. 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?!?!?!

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

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

  33. 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

  34. “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)

    1. (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)

  35. 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.

  36. 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?

  37. 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. Lol I got both right while I fell for most riddles videos in YouTube. I guess my optical brain is better than my logical brain.

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