psychology
february 2015
BY ADITHI IYER
Why “The Dress” and Other Illusions Don’t Have to Make Sense
image sources
Wired.com(left)
ScienceandReligion.com(right)
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The memedom has been lit aflame in past days with the conundrum behind “the dress”
The memedom has been lit aflame in past days with the conundrum behind “the dress”, an optical illusion of mega-exposure that has us all divided between the colors we see in a now-famous Tumblr photo. Some think it’s white and gold, and others think it’s black and blue- and while we now know that the dress was indeed black and blue, it’s curious that only 30% of people surveyed said they saw the colors as they really were. So why is it that some people saw it differently, and what does that say about us? Well, it turns out that it’s all relative to our minds and how we interpret the things we see.
The biological systems of the eyes- specifically the color-defining cone and contrast-defining rod cells- play a large part in getting us to identify the contrast of the dress in natural light by naturally adjusting the background. But the colors appear the same way at face value; after all, it’s the same picture. The difference in how we see things lies in how our minds interpret the background of the picture.