Shadow Optical Illusion

This optical illusion is reproduced with the permission of Professor Edward Adelson of M.I.T. Click here for details on the Professor's site. Thanks also to Andy Grüneberg for bringing this to our attention.

Optical illusions can act as great creative stimulators because they are visual, engaging the right hand side of the brain, and force you to see things differently as you attempt to work out just what is happening.

This is simply the best optical illusion we've ever seen.

If you have any doubts, import the picture into a graphics program like Paint and cut out and copy the squares to put them alongside each other. The result will be like this: