Talk about different perceptions!
karasti
BreathingMinnesota Moderator
If you haven't seen already, there is a picture posted to the internet of a dress asking what color it is.You can pause the video at the top so you don't have to listen to them yammer on, and scroll down a little for the picture of the dress. Some people see 1 set of colors, some see a totally different set of colors. Wired explained why we see different colors, talking about how the brain perceives things differently. I just found it interesting to compare something as simple as this and how different we see it. Then trying to expect us to see experiences, feelings, beliefs and so on in the same light? I personally see white and gold.
I notice the same perceptional differences between what I look like in photos and what I look like in the mirror, even on the same day in the same outfit, the difference is amazing.
http://www.today.com/popculture/white-or-gold-blue-or-black-dress-sets-internet-ablaze-2D80518434
Comments
Yes that was odd... I saw black/blue at first, then checked back and saw it as white/gold... I was playing around with it and found I could manipulate to see it blue or white, at my will, but even had it change on me while looking at it.
I always saw it as blue and black.... or maybe black and blue.... but definitely never white and gold.....no matter how I looked at it....
Blue/Black is the correct answer http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
My husband too sees black and blue. I can maybe find a very very slight hue of light blue in the white, but that is it. It's definitely white and gold to me, LOL. So crazy.
The science of why we see it different is here:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
@karasti , does this mean we can never see eye to eye...?!
The funny thing is, I emailed the picture to my husband and asked what he saw. Blue and black. Someone else had printed it and brought it to his work. The one he saw printed was white and gold. So he opened the one I emailed him, and now he sees white and gold on that one, too. Our brains are crazy, lol.
I think about that often, and now I'll wonder even more, lol. It's been quite cold here lately, but the cold weather makes for very clear skies and air here, very starry nights, very magnificent blue sky mornings. It makes me hope that everyone else sees what I see. But who knows!
No wonder I have trouble in the mornings picking out blue versus brown socks!
(Wear the green. Sorted.)
Cool!
@Telly03 lol what do you mean by 'correct' ?
Perceptions vary! Pretty amazing. Just noticing this is a very powerful thing!
Blue and black obviously. I used to do theatre stage lighting so I know about colours!
That dress is clearly, obviously blue and black (or dark brown). I tried very hard to see white/off white and gold. I squinted, I sat down in a different spot, but the dress stayed blue and black.
Now running through my mind all the while is "what a bunch of sh*t, another manufactured drama, what is wrong with these people? What kind of eye disease causes that dress to look white and gold?"
It's not that the people seeing off white and gold really AREN'T seeing that, they're really seeing blue and black but are too dense to realize it. What happens when perspective is really that different? How do we know it's perspective and not glaucoma or 'insanity' or an ego trip? Can't perspective be a function of glaucoma, 'insanity' and ego trips? Who decides? People I know well see ghosts, or have. They aren't lying, or crazy or whatever.
It's a buzz kill for sure. How can I possibly be RIGHT if what I 'see' is 'perception'?
Colour perception does have a biological basis, and people generally agree unless they have an eye defect. I suspect the problem is more about how people label colours.
When I was doing stage lighting we used colour filters called gels to put in front of the lamps. The gel book had over a hundred distinct named colours, so with practice it's possible to differentiate very small differences in colour tone. People may well give them different names, but the difference is there.
I don't know if he was referencing 'the dress' but I kind of thought so, and this tweet last night made me laugh:
Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson · 14h 14 hours ago
If we were honest about shortcomings of human physiology then "optical illusions” would instead be labeled “brain failures”.
LOL
Brain failure. I think in the Wired article it mentions something to do with the background affecting how people actually see the dress. I might not see things the way my husband does. How do we know that when I say "yes, the sky is blue" and he agrees that he isn't really seeing purple but has labeled it blue? We have no way of really knowing that. But we are in agreement with the name of the label. The dress is another case altogether. Now it just means he can win any argument because his brain processed correctly and mine failed 
I had to do a colour perception test before training as an electrician, where obviously you do need to reliably see the difference between red, blue and green.
As I said there is a biological objectivity to colour perception, it's the labelling that's usually the problem.
Fascinating.
At first I saw it as gold and white, without doubt. Then I heard people were, beyond belief, including someone I have just been talking to seeing it as 'obviously' blue and black. I looked again, squinted and incredibly increasingly and gradually saw it as blue and black, without doubt. I have now gone back to white and gold, again without doubt. (just checked blue and black again)
There was an intermediary stage of gold and blue and I may experiment with the two perceptions going to different eyes. Ideally I would like to see both sets simultaneously but that might not be possible . . .
Amazing.
Same thing happened to me, saw white and gold at first, or you might say, saw the illusion at first. I think the reason why I saw white and gold at first is because the contour of the fabric reflected some colors off the lighting. The contour of the blue fabric reflected white, and the contour of the black fabric reflected yellowish light.
That's really strange. Is there some biological difference going on here?
Yes different light sensitive eye cones in people that seem to be triggered differently very particularly in this image. Most unsettling, particularly if the same image can go both ways.
Seeing is believing?
Nah!
All of our sense data is subjective. Welcome to the face of truth's chaos.
I had another look, blue and black, no uncertainty for me at all. So it's a difference in brain function then? Weird.
I wouldn't want you as an electrician.
@SpinyNorman
I have too often run across safety power switches that only disconnected the neutral on Natural Gas equipment to think that an electrician's subjectivity is limited to color blindness tests.
( and that example is with white and black)
I don't know how people are getting white and gold. Someone on another website explained it, that it's due to faulty rods and cones in the retina that cause it to appear white and gold. That's kind of scary.
The bright light in the background and the proportional aspect of the picture also makes it difficult to determine the color. People who saw white and gold at first are usually people who tend to look at more things when looking at something I would say, or quite the opposite.
It looked light purple and navy at first, but yeah it is black and blue (soo many different shades of blue/purple, it's a touchy subject - my grandma used to sew (she lived with us) and she had every color thread imaginable, so it was important for her to get just the right color to match the material or whatever.
I saw it white and gold the first time, now it looks blue and gold.
Pink and green.
What..... nobody sees pink....?
Green....?
No.....?
OK.
It's funny because I (and it seems most others who saw white and gold) never test or report eye problems. It seems to me if it were truly a faulty process, something wrong biologically, it would have presented prior to the dress being posted on the internet considering it seems rather a significant % of people see white/gold instead of blue/black. I've never had any eye trouble with any testing so in this bizarre perceptual boundary where the perfect things are at play to cause a problem, I don't worry about it much. In any case, seeing the wrong color might keep me from buying an ugly dress,
That's what I thought too, but last night I was reading a rebuttal to this very idea written by a physicist to the biologist Robert Lanza (of the "Biocentrism" there is life in this universe because essentially the universe is alive).
The argument from the physicists, who say Lanza uses 'bad physics' for his rationales, is that perception is not solely subjective and dependent upon an observer. And then they made a good argument for that having to do with objective verification for color.
And THEN I saw Robert Lanza and Deepak Chopra have gotten together to promote each other's ideas. My disappointment is painful! But anyway, I hope I bookmarked that 'rebuttal', I'll go look for it. This probably isn't important in the great scheme of things and fist-pump to the face of truth's chaos
Technically correct, based on society's established RGB color values, because I believe it was the wired.com site that looked at the RGB values of the pixels, which concluded black/blue
interesting approach but tenuous proof at best. color is contextual.
You can read about it by searching "simultaneous contrast"
http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/contrast.html
Do we really give this much of a shit....?
Shit is normally brown
Cool image from the comic xkcd...
emphasis on the 'normally'.....
Gold and white. I at no time see anything close to black and blue. Intriguing!
Optical illusions, including ways to see the dress both ways, make a Still Buddha move etc
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/
Are our opinions also delusional? IMHO it all depends on which mind addresses them . . .
That was the top picture. In the picture where we can see the woman's blond hair (don't tell me it's black) the dress is black and blue with the very top being black.
Then when I quickly scrolled up, the top picture was black and blue but when I pulled it back down, it was gold and white again.
Yep, in the picture where we see the blond hair and the red background I always see the dress as black and blue but the close ups can be either depending on how the eye and the light meets.
It's an optical illusion just like looking at tight, straight lines makes them look squiggly.
Looked again and yes, scrolling slowly, I get light blue and gold for the close ups but the illusion goes away when the background is stark.
Colour perception may be contextual but colour itself is objectively based on the wavelength of the light reflected.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. Electrical wiring colours are chosen for contrast and usually based on primary colours like red, blue, and green. Part of being an electrician is knowing the different methods of isolation and making a circuit safe is obviously a well-established procedure. I still got several shocks while I was working, usually when I was tired, fortunately they were all single phase at the lower 240 Volts.
@ SpinyNorman
hey! You were the one that brought up electricians here.
Every so often after shutting off the power to some natural gas equipment, I melt the repair tool I'm using in a shower of sparks because some self proclaimed installing electrician has (out of two possible wires--white and black) chosen the wrong one to use to wire the shut off to.
If they can mess up something as basic as white with black, I can't imagine what goes on with the subtler range of wiring colors.
but yes color blindness should not be confused with incompetence.
Yes, indeed. White and black seem like an odd choice of colour for electrical wiring?
definitely not found in the UK.....
So where can I find some colors independent of perception
?
I should quickly add that breaking coloration into wavelengths is extremely useful in many applications, including botany where it's helpful to know what areas of the full-spectrum plants need to grow -- but "scientific objectivity" is something i've come to challenge over the years.
So yeah, that question is for you!
That's more of a philosophical point, but I don't usually have a problem with what science says about these things. But also it's based on practical experience, like being an electrician and doing stage lighting, where you need to reliably identify differences in colour tone. And lots of things are colour coded if you think about it, not just traffic lights!
"Talk about different perceptions!"
Seeing in this case is disbelieving "Things are not always what they seem" (No shit)