‘My Brain Refuses to Believe There Are 4 People in This Photo’

On February 14 2021, a Facebook user shared the following post (archived), captioned “My brain refuses to believe there are 4 people in this photo”:

On Facebook, the post moved and racked up shares quickly. Commenters all shared the original poster’s confusion about the number of people in the image, writing:

“That is some functional camo!”

“Not gonna lie, I had to enlarge this photo in order to see that there was, in fact, another arm there. Wow.”

“I had to read through the comments here to figure it out ????”

Although a Reddit logo was visible at the bottom of the image, the post didn’t link through to an original post. Using reverse image search, we located reposts (on r/woahdude and r/funny) as  well as the original post to Reddit’s r/confusing_perspective by u/BalrogBunghole on February 13 2021:

Redditors, like Facebook users, commented about the efficacy of the fourth drinker’s camouflage. And as is commonplace for Reddit, a user with a situationally appropriate user name chimed in:

A day later (the same day the image was shared to Facebook), it went similarly viral via Twitter:

That tweet (which, like the Facebook post, received six-figure engagement counts) was published just after 2 AM; the Facebook post with an identical caption appeared about 14 hours later. On February 15 2021, a screenshot of the tweet made its way onto Reddit sister-site Imgur, simply captioned “Neat!”

Continuing the tradition of high engagement metrics, the Imgur version received nearly 150,000 views in roughly a 24-hour span:

Although the version initially captioned “My brain refuses to believe there are 4 people in this photo” went viral on Twitter, Imgur, and Facebook separately, the popular image appeared to originate on Reddit’s r/confusing_perspective on February 13 2021. In a comment on one of many reposts, u/BalrogBunghole acknowledged the image was being shared without credit, adding that they “would be bummed, but [they’ve] been around the block enough to know this is the way of things.” But there are, indeed, four people in this photo — that we know of.