[dahart]

The color scientists who first told me about the McCollough effect adamantly refused to ever try it, saying it could damage your vision forever.

So I was scared to try it, but eventually I did and for me the effect went away after a couple minutes. Maybe I'm lucky, but the warnings & the legend of the effect lasting months make such a good story, I have to wonder if it's a little overstated.

But -- what if the effect is just as easy to unlearn somehow, as it is to learn? It's existence may have a lot to do with gratings being pretty uncommon in nature, leaving a weak spot in the system that is easily trainable and slow to re-adapt just because we don't stare at gratings very often.

[jacobolus]

How long did you stare at the test pattern?

For long-lasting effect mis-calibrating any of these low level visual recognizers, you need to look at the test pattern for quite a while. Just a minute or two isn’t going to prompt a long-term effect.

[dahart]

Ah, you're right. That part was left out of the warnings I got. "Jones and Holding (1975) found that 15 minutes of induction can lead to an effect lasting 3.5 months."

I don't remember how long I tried the first time, but I'm sure it was not longer than 2-3 minutes.

The article says an anti-McCoullough effect can override the first effect. Can you also undo or override one ME with another ME using opposing colors?

[Bjartr]

I wonder if image recognition neural networks would be susceptible to this during training