Gold and white or blue and black, trending on Twitter

No, not at all. If I hadn't seen a shift in colour for myself off the same computer, same web site, same picture, in the same room, with the same light, I might not have disagreed. But this is not to do with what colour of light you view the picture in. I'm not sure what conditions need to pre-exist for the brain to perceive it BB or GW.

 

I can personally attest that that is not true. My mother, father, and I have all looked at the dress on the same phone, in the same lighting and get different answers.

 

No, your brain filters are hardly random. And with most optical illusions you can un-see them though there are some you have a harder time with than others.

I'm not sure what is going on with the people who saw black and now see gold or vice versa.

 

I'd really like to know this too.

And can someone tell the little green guy yelling in my ear to FO.

 

My sources must be wrong then. Must be just something to do with your eyes then...

If anything explains it I guess this video would:

 

It 's a very good video but in most cases, everyone I know would identify a strawberry as red. Even if it's different, everyone I know would normally call the sky blue, except in Vancouver in November. But with this dress, some normal people see gold while others see blue, and that is very weird.

 

This is an interesting point I've contemplated before. If we traded brains and kept our memories of color, I might find my red was your blue. But when you saw blue but learned that color was called red, we would still agree the strawberry was red.

Now on the other hand, this could explain some people's lack of sense of which colors looked good together.

 

Ever thought about what really determines sex?

Why Schrodinger's cat isn't dead and alive at the same time?

Partly because you can't be all those things at the same time physically, but also because our mind would dislike acknowledging the possibility in the first place. Preference is almost a tribal human cognitive function.

 

@theoriginalmonsterman
@GingerCoffee

But wouldn't the colors we perceive be the same? Hues may be different though. I say this because if that were the case then the color wheel would not flow together correctly and people would argue about it.

 

You've got to go with your spouse and pick out paint for the bathroom or tiles for the kitchen to understand how really different we see colours. Half the divorces in America can be traced back to a trip to the hardware store.

 

Not anymore than colorblindness causes people to question the color wheel. Think of this as one difference between individuals, perhaps they lack the ability to perceive a small range of one or more colors.

Color perception depends on the wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum. In this case, 25% of the population, those that see black, might lack perception of a small slice of that visible wavelength. Or it could be that 75% is missing the slice.

 

Something in this special case causes the mind to flip to a certain perception algorithm. If the dress was a singular colour, I don't believe anyone would witness this anomaly. There is an interplay between the stripes and the colours that causes the mind to set up a particular perception. I am now stuck in gold/white mode, where initially I saw black/blue.

 

I'll coin the explanation. Like wheels apparently reversing under a car driving forward (without special custom spinners attached on the wheels), or a very slow rotating propeller on a hovering helicopter (without special... never mind) on TV or other recorded video. Interference patterns of the wavelengths reflected by the seen colors. Why we see one color or the other is still not explained but it might be just the way we're wired like one person might dislike peanut butter and someone else miraculously likes the same thing.

I'm not keeping track of this news story, is there an official explanation? Press release? Revealing interview I missed?

 

But what is interesting here is that the same person can see it one way, and then the next time they look at it they see it the other way; like some magic eye picture, or those vases/faces, or that hollow mask that spins and appears convex when it is in fact concave.

The fact is that the "black" is actually a mixture of black and gold and the "blue" is a very light blue containing a lot of white. I am almost wondering if it is similar to the manner in which some people describe turquoise as green and other's as blue when it is both (or neither).

 

I see dark yellowish brown and French blue in those boxes.

Maybe some of the confusion arises because people aren't specifying what shade of blue, black, gold, or white they're seeing in what appears to be three over-exposed versions of the same photo. From what I saw of the dress in the store window photo (and in the one taken next to the bride), it's a royal blue with black trim of a shade I can't determine on my computer screen

Like some others here, I am also good at mixing paint for matching and I know well that where it comes to shadows in a painting you'll find some surprising shades. But I cannot conceive how anyone with healthy eyes sees the body of that dress as royal blue in that picture.

 

I don't think people are seeing the royal blue that is the actual dress color. I don't think the blue is all that controversial. A shade of blue or a shade of white could just be our individual eyes.

It's the black people see that I find interesting. I see gold on the dress and a dark orange or brown on the square.

 

I could never make myself see white and gold.