Saturday, February 28, 2015

The Great Dress Debate of 2015

So this actually made national news.
The dress is ACTUALLY blue and black, so why do most people see white and gold?
Well the reason is simple. Our brain is good at taking in information and reasoning a bunch of things that aren't there.
Look at this image
Are Squares A and B the same color?
The answer is yes!
But you yell, "they aren't! B looks completely different now!"
Actually, B looks different because your mind sees a contrast with squares next to it and a shadow over it. You think it's lighter because your brain knows that if there was no shadow, then the square would be lighter than A. It processed information that wasn't actually there.

That's what happened in the great dress picture. The lighting and background made it look like it was white and gold to some people because their brains were filling in information that wasn't exactly there.

Source: Buzzfeed Article about this dress.

1 comment:

Ross said...

A little more explanation on the background bit: So our eyes are special in that they try really hard to distinguish illumination from actual color. "What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. “So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.” Mr. Conway actually sees blue and orange.