Look at the little black cross at the center of this soft color field. Try not to move your eyes. Notice what happens to your perception of the colors in the rest of the area.
Did the colors mostly fade away to gray? It's caused by a neural adaptation that reduces your attention to a non changing stimulus. This happens because:
"the neurons in the visual system beyond the rods and cones have large receptive fields. This means that the small, involuntary eye movements made when fixating on something fail to move the stimulus onto a new cell's receptive field, in effect giving unvarying stimulation."
Source: Wikipedia on Troxler's Fading
I'm guessing, now, but my thought about the fading is that this is how man, back in tribal/hunter gatherer days, was better able to pick up moving prey/game in the distance.
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