I did an experiment once where I made my computer background a similar image that produced the same undulating movement illusion, to see if I would lose sensitivity to it over time. Not only did I not desensitize, I think I actually became more sensitive to it with time, and I would get flashes of that sensation looking at grass and trees and shit. Still do every once in a rare while, it’s kind of similar to the phenomenon where you think you see someone you recognize, but at a second glance they are obviously a stranger. I’ll just get the occasional random “movement detected” sense from a pattern in woodgrain or raindrops on a windshield, but when I look back at it I usually can’t see it again. It’s an odd feeling.
Ever done psychedelics? It can cause the same long-lasting memory/flashbacks and recognition of patterns in objects.
I have, and it’s hard to disambiguate the effects because they do overlap. But I think the experiment had an effect because I noticed it strengthening while I was looking at that background image every day, and then there was a sharp dropoff after I stopped using that background. If I had bothered to graph it, I expect the relationship between “number of days since using that background” and “number of illusion incidents in the wild” would have looked like a power curve. Unfortunately I am not much of a data collector, more of a casual data observer, so I may never know for sure 🤷
