What do you see? Perceptual test

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Hello,
Yesterday a friend showed me a picture of a pattern on-line and asked me what I saw. It turned out that what I saw at first was quite different than what she (and others) saw at first and I'm wondering if the difference in our perception has to do with autistic brain wiring. Here is a link to the image:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater

Be sure to scroll down as needed to view the whole image.

I am interested to know what others see when first looking at this. I don't want to say anything in this post that might effect the outcome, so I will make another post later to record my own results. So if you are interested in doing this perceptual test, look at the image for 30 seconds or so and notice what you see and post your result before reading on.

whichever circle I'm looking at directly doesn't move, but the ones next to them rotate. Some go clockwise others counterclockwise.

Yep, same here. Interesting--they aren't really moving, but your brain tricks you into thinking they are. I wonder what causes the illusion...

I can reduce the effect by looking at it with only one eye, or by unfocusing my eyes so that I don't see as much detail. Maybe that's significant.

The dots jump out at me - with the spinning mostly random.

If I don't look directly at them, they appear to be rotating. Also, I have the sensation of going inward if I look at the very center.

Same here.

The black dots seem to pulsate while the rest rotates slowly. If I stare at the middle, the rotating stops, but the black dots become more prominent.

They stop rotating when I look at the circle and the rest move but not all of them. The four in the middle move and so do the top two and the bottom two and the ones in the middle at the top and bottom are hardly moving. But they keep changing and move directions sort of and then back to clockwise again or counter.

I found the image so painful to look at that I couldn't experiment with it. But it looked to me like an "X" of gears moving together, with the other gears being stationary. Interesting.

I've looked at a lot of these optical illusions before, much fun.

This one, I crossed my eyes at it until it went 3d "magic eye," and for a bit of a spell, the rest of the world completely ceased to exist. I uncrossed my eyes before I pooped my pants though, FYI.

Every time I shift from one circle to another, they all seem to slowly lock into place, then they rotate again. But the one I'm staring at still moves in jerky "low battery" motions though, at least at the center.....

I see most of them rotating ccw or cw at different rates. When I look directly at one circle, only the others move. They rotate faster when I look closer (detail?). The five circles along the imaginary mark "+" don't seem to move at all, only the ones along the mark "X", minus the one in the center.

I've seen this image somewhere before.

I don't like pictures like that. I'm very prone to motion sickness and looking at them bothers me and makes me feel weird.

Oh, I didn't notice it before, but I see the same. It's weird how staring at the middle stops movement and the black dots appear.

Well, maybe it's just my personal brain wiring. When my friend first told me to look at it, I studied it intently but did not percieve the rotation. She kept asking, "What do you see?" and I described the image as I saw it, "It is nine groups of concentric circils with a group of four others on top..."
Then she asked, "What else do you see?" I said I saw the green centers that look like atoms. "But what ELSE do you see???" she insisted. I started to think there was some kind of embedded image that I wasn't getting. Then she said, "Do you see how it's rotating?" This was about 60 seconds into me looking at it. Only then did I percieve the apparent rotation.

I thought, maybe this is an example of looking at the parts and not seeing the whole.

if I dont focus, black centers pulsate tween black and gray and each "Gear" wobbles back and forth.
I I focus on the very middle, I feel like im getting a migraine.