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It also shows how the human brain is constantly interpreting the world around us, and how our perception of reality is often subjective. Even WIRED's own photo team---driven briefly into existential spasms of despair by how many of them saw a white-and-gold dress---eventually came around to the contextual, color-constancy explanation. "I initially thought it was white and gold," says Neil Harris, our senior photo editor. "When I attempted to white-balance the image based on that idea, though, it didn't make any sense." He saw blue in the highlights, telling him that the white he was seeing was blue, and the gold was black. And when Harris reversed the process, balancing to the darkest pixel in the image, the dress popped blue and black. "It became clear that the appropriate point in the image to balance from is the black point," Harris says.
Whatever was at work in February 2015 with this now-infamous photograph was much bigger than simple rods and cones. "As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system,"writes Edward Abelson, who posted the illusion. "The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view."
What is colour vision?
The brains of those who saw a brown and blue dress are likely used to something in between. In February 2015, a photograph of a dress went viral on the internet, sparking a debate over its color. Some people saw the dress as white and gold, while others saw it as blue and black. The dress illusion, as it came to be known, was one of the most talked-about topics on social media that year.
Similarly, a study found that identical twins (who share 100% of their DNA) don’t always see the dress the same way, although they are more likely than fraternal twins (who only share about 50% of their DNA) to see it as the same color. That suggests that genes have some influence on how we see The Dress, but that most of the effect is driven by our environment and life experiences. This makes sense, he says, because people who wake up early are, over their lifetimes, exposed to more blue light than are people who tend to stay up into the night, surrounded by artificial yellow light.
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This finding underlies the fact that we can’t always trust what we see; scientists have learned that when we visually perceive something, our brains fill in any gaps of information with what it already assumes is true. In the case of the dress, perceptions of illumination change our assumptions about color constancy, which can result in widely different opinions about how something can look. So what do you think, is it blue and black or white and gold? I’ve recreated an optical illusion in this article to show you exactly the blue and black dress explanation. For neuroscientists like Bevil Conway, “The Dress” phenomenon marked the greatest extent of individual differences in color perception ever documented.
Wallisch came to this conclusion after surveying 13,000 study participants who claimed to have previously seen a photo of the infamous dress about how they thought it was illuminated. Wallisch found that people who thought the dress was in a shadow were more likely to think it was gold and white. "This is how the brain interprets this image and different colors of light will be refracted, or different wavelengths of light, are refracted, each a little bit differently in the eye," he says. At the same time, the way the dress is captured on camera could also be playing a significant role in this debate.
White And Gold Or Blue And Black? Scientists Explain Why Everyone Sees The Dress Differently
Lots of personal factors can influence the way we interpret different hues, from cataracts, to lighting, to context. As we’ve seen in this case of The Dress, colours can be entirely subjective and change depending on assumptions your brain makes without you fully understanding why. It can also depending “on the viewing history of the individual observer”, with what you see being based on your past memories and experiences with similar shades. This explains why there was such a divide when it came to The Dress, with everyone’s brains reacting differently to a unique combination of colours in the photo.
On 3 March, the Johnstons, Bleasdale, and MacNeill appeared as guests on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in the United States. Rather than seeing the color of the dress itself as either white or blue with gold or black trim, the participants reported seeing a spectrum of shades from light blue to dark blue, with yellow/gold to dark brown/black trim, the researchers found. Nonetheless, when the dress color was a certain brightness, the participants deemed it "white," and when it was below that brightness, they called it "blue." Depending on whom you ask, itmight be black and blue or white and gold.
The dress
A few days later, on 26 February, McNeill reposted the image to her blog on Tumblr and posed the same question to her followers, which led to further public discussion surrounding the image. The researchers found that the colors people reported are the same colors found in daylight — which tends to be bluish at noon and yellowish at dawn or dusk — in agreement with Conway's team. As such, the phenomenon would not have happened if the dress had been red, they said. There's a scientific explanation for why #TheDress looks black and blue to some people and white and gold to the others.
It's taken three years for a debate even close to the magnitude of #TheDress to pop up, although others have tried. Over the course of two days in February 2015, #TheDress sparked more than 4.4 million tweets. In the 12 hours since Yanny-Laurel picked up on Twitter, it's sparked over 750,000 Tweets. We hate spam and only use your email to contact you about newsletters. For these scientists who have studied The Dress, the photo has profound implications. Naturally, the debate surrounding the dress included the Illuminati.
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