It’s funny how something as ordinary as a plain white T-shirt can turn an entire roomful of confident adults into confused, second-guessing skeptics. An image began circulating online not long ago: a simple shirt lying flat on a neutral background. No patterns, no tricks, no shadows that jump out at you. Just fabric and silence. And yet, the moment someone asked, “How many holes are in this T-shirt?” the internet set itself on fire with disagreement.
It became one of those deceptively simple puzzles that squeeze right into the middle of your day and refuse to let go. People stared at the picture with the same intensity they’d reserve for a high-stakes test. First glance answers came fast—two, maybe four. But the longer someone looked, the more their answer shifted. What made it maddening wasn’t the complexity of the shirt but the way the mind instinctively ignored what was right in front of it.
Most of us don’t stop to consider the openings in the clothes we wear. We don’t think, “This shirt has a head hole, two sleeve holes, and a bottom hole.” We just put it on and move on. So when faced with the puzzle, people treated the torn parts as the only real “holes,” forgetting that everything else counts too.
The correct answer is eight…
