Staring at a blurry image can make it completely disappear from your sight.

Troxler's fading was first discovered by Swiss physician Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler in 1804. He observed that when a person focuses on a central point for a short period, stationary stimuli in the peripheral vision begin to fade and eventually disappear. This occurs due to neural adaptation, a process where sensory neurons stop responding to constant, unchanging stimuli.The neurons in the visual system are designed to detect movement and changes in contrast rather than static states. When an image is blurry or has low contrast, the boundaries are less defined, making it easier for the brain to filter them out as 'background noise.' This is similar to how you stop feeling the sensation of clothes against your skin or the smell of a room after being there for a while.Small, involuntary eye movements called microsaccades usually prevent this fading by constantly shifting the image across different retinal cells. However, if you consciously minimize these movements while staring at a fuzzy object, the photoreceptors in the eye become fatigued. Once these cells stop sending new signals to the primary visual cortex, the brain fills in the 'missing' area with the surrounding color or white space.Modern studies by researchers like Susana Martinez-Conde have used this phenomenon to study how the brain creates our conscious perception of reality. It demonstrates that what we 'see' is actually a highly edited construction created by the brain rather than a direct video feed of the world. This biological efficiency allows the brain to save energy by ignoring irrelevant, non-threatening information in our environment.