Today I stumbled upon this link to a couple of remixes of the classic “afterimage” optical illusion. Apparently someone decided that plain old nationalist was not enough and decided to create an image of their country’s flag that basically gets burned in your retinas for a short time. As opposed to the classic Jesus afterimage, these flags are in full-color, not just black and white.

Of course I couldn’t stay back, so I decided to create an image of the Mexican flag which will give you a full-colored afterimage:

To view this, just stare at the eagle in the center of the flag for about 20-30 seconds trying not to blink, then quickly look away from your monitor (preferably to a white surface) and you’ll se the Mexican flag in full-color! You might need to blink a few times before the afterimage sinks in. Alternatively you can mouse over the image after staring at it, and it will disappear, leaving you with a white background without having to turn away. Unfortunately the eagle in the center of the flag is not very clear, but at least you can see that there’s something brown in the center of the flag.

On a more technical note, in case you’re wondering how it works, here’s the explanation: There are three types of color receptors in your retina, each type is more sensitive to either red, blue or green. When you stare at an image with one of these colors for too long the receptors for that color get “tired”. Since the receptors are “tired”, when you look away from the image those receptors don’t work as well as they should and you end up with an afterimage of the opposite colors from the ones in the original image. Enjoy!