Color changing circles or just another optical illusion?

A mind-bending optical illusion recently shared on Twitter has gone viral - and it's making people question their own eyes.

The 'Confetti' illusion was created by David Novick, a computer and information science engineer.

It shows 12 circles with multi-coloured horizontal stripes.

Take a quick glance at the picture, and the circles will appear green, red and purple.

Look a little more carefully, and you will realise that all the 12 circles are the same light brown colour.

"A three-color confetti illusion with spheres, which appear to be yellowish, reddish, and purpleish but in fact have exactly the same light-brown base color," wrote Mr Novick while sharing the optical illusion on Twitter. He added that shrinking the image would result in an increase in the effect.

Confused? Don't believe your eyes? You're not alone.

Here's how people reacted to the "mind-boggling" optical illusion:

And if you want to see how exactly the illusion works, one helpful Twitter user shared an animation too:

So why do the brown circles appear red, purple and green?

According to SYFY.com, this is called the Munker-White illusion, because of which the way we perceive colours changes according to the colours around them.

This, meanwhile, is not the only optical illusion to have gone viral recently.

A picture that appears to show a beach, but is actually something quite different, also had people scratching their heads.