Only 1% Of People Can Spot Second Tiger In This Optical Illusion

Who doesn’t love a good optical illusion? Especially when you know that spotting the hidden message within lumps you in the top 1% of smartypants. 

Well, get your eyeballs around this trippy tiger picture, and prepare for your mind to start fizzing as you try to spot the hidden second tiger in the image.

That’s right, the below illustration contains not one, but two tigers, although the second comes with a catch. 

That’s because the second ‘hidden tiger’ isn’t really a tiger at all, but rather the words ‘hidden tiger’ spelled out.

If you look carefully at the animal’s torso, you’ll see the two words stretching across the tiger’s stomach and down one of its back legs. You’re welcome. 

The paper also notes that optical illusions are actually vital for researchers trying to understand the inner workings of our ever-mysterious brains. 

Writing in 2017, University of Sydney scientists Kim Ransley and Alex O. Holcombe explained that ‘visual illusions show us that we do not have direct access to reality’.

They added: "They can also provide an inkling of the mental processing that delivers our experience of the viewable world.

"Indeed, it is the processing happening inside our brains that is the basis for many illusions.

"Rather than delivering information from our eyes in nearly raw form as a camera would, the brain tries to determine what is actually out there.

"When the information entering the eye is ambiguous, the brain must make educated guesses."

The outlet notes that when we look at an optical illusion, we're actually seeing the light that bounces off it and hits our eyes. 

This takes roughly a tenth of a second, but because light is a constant stream, we're constantly receiving information about what we're looking at, 'so it’s really difficult for our brains to try to focus on everything at once'.

Because of this, our brains take 'shortcuts' and simplify what we're seeing to 'help us concentrate on what's important'. 

In turn, this 'helps compensate for your brain’s tenth-of-a-second processing lag' – optical illusions are images that take advantage of these shortcuts and fool our own brains into thinking something else.

Or, in this particular case, someone has just managed to disguise words as tiger stripes very well.