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5 Optical Illusions That Show You Why Your Brain Messes With The Dress

OK, by now you’ve seen “The Dress.” It has torn families apart and started raging online factions of amateur color theorists. But what is really going on? Rather than expound on visual perception and color theory, maybe it would be easiest to take a look at a number of mind-bending optical illusions that twist our perception the in the same way.

Here’s the first. The two dogs below are the same color:

DressIllusion_1

Don’t believe me? What if I remove the background?

DressIllusion_2

Obviously the gradient pups are the same color here, but it’s almost impossible to see above. The only difference is the background. What our brain is doing is compensating for the brightness, colors, etc., of the background and adding/subtracting information to literally create the “correct” color. The wavelengths of light hitting your eye might be objective, but color perception certainly is not.

Next is the “checker shadow illusion,” developed by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT. This illusion highlights the importance of colors too, but more so how the brain adjusts colors when shadows are present. Squares A and B are the same color (seeing a pattern here?):

DressIllusion_5

The checker shadow illusion is particularly hard to swallow, but the GIF says it all.

So the problem with the dress likely has to do with lighting and backgrounds, but color as well. Let’s combine the first two illusions in another. Again, you guessed it — the “brown” square in the middle of the top face of the Rubik’s Cube is the same color as the “orange” square in the middle face facing you:

DressIllusion_3

Remove the shadows and the same-colored squares reveal themselves.

These illusions are easy to see through. Just change the lighting or cut out a piece of the images and the illusions collapses. Unfortunately, the dress seems to be impervious to that kind of reveal — blue and black switches to white and gold seemingly without anything else changing. But again, more straight-forward illusions that highlight the principles behind this viral singularity make it seem less mysterious.

For example, blocks A and B are the exact same color, and if you put your finger over the intersection of the two, you can instantly see that is the case:

DressIllusion_4

How the brain perceives backgrounds and lighting and object orientation is fundamental to shaping what we see. We don’t really even see the world for what it is — we see models of the world that have happened to work out for us as a species over millions of years of evolution. The dress really is a fascinating case of visual perception precisely because it is an image that teeters on the edge of the brain’s color and lighting models for so many people.

And for what it’s worth, when you do expose the dress like you would any of the illusions above, here too the mystery disappears:

DressIllusion_6

For more information, check out my video explanation of the dress phenomenon below:

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Comments

  1. Sammy says:

    Explanation is very good but doesn’t pan out. I changed the background in a photo editor to several solid block colours: Black, 2 shades of grey, 2 shades of blue, purple. The dress always stays white and gold for me. If I squint really hard I can make it go black and dark blue

  2. Blerg says:

    At the bottom I just see two girls in desperate need of new dresses because they’re so faded from the wash :/

  3. Everyone should watch Brain Games on Netflix. It shows these and N.P.H. is the voiceover.

  4. Beth says:

    No matter how it is manipulated, I always see blue/black, just more washed-out, yellow shades of blue black when I see it manipulated to make it more gold/white (which only worsens the yellow color cast and fading to me). But I also do a lot of color correcting of photos, so maybe I’m just used to badly exposed, poorly white-balanced photos. What I find fascinating is that even when it is balanced off of the black item in the back to remove the yellow cast and the exposure brought down, some people still see white/gold. 
    The part I find funny is the people who still argue about the actual dress, not the photo, even though it has been shown and confirmed by the people who were at the wedding to be blue/black. Those people are an interesting bit of psychology.

  5. sergio says:

    Everything ok and cool, but the checker gif is fake, or at least the shade is fake! I thought there was some kind of trick, and I found that. http://gizmodo.com/5831698/this-optical-illusion-is-melting-my-brain

  6. Orionsangel says:

    I can now change it at will from gold and white to black and blue by just staring it.

    • Bbh says:

      Same here. But I won’t be convinced we have the explanation as to why this is, or any of it is, until we know how to repeat the phenom.

    • Sammy says:

      I see gold and white. If I squint hard I can make it change to dark brown/black and dark blue/purple. For some other white and gold friends I’ve asked to try it works too. Others not.

      Interesting that you guys don’t need to squint.