Is the dress white and gold or is it blue and black? This question has been plaguing social media for the past day and an answer has been found. The dress is in fact blue. But why do so many of us (me included) see white and gold?
We all want to be able to trust our eyes and believe what we see, but in this case what we know we see is just plain wrong.
“Light enters the eye through the lens … The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image,” reported wired.com in an article.
The next step is where the confusion is taking place.
According to cbs.com, “Human eyes and brains have evolved to see color in a sunlit world, as a result, we perceive only the reflected colors. Blue light has the shortest wavelength making it harder to see than other colors.”
So what do the eyes of Taylor Swift and Mindy Kaling, who correctly interpret the dress in its true blue form, have that mine don’t?
“People either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black,” Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College, told wired.com.
Our eyes make this decision without us even realizing it, separating the Taylors and Mindys from the rest of us who erroneously and stubbornly stand by our white and gold vision.
Sources:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/27/dress-color-see-white-gold-b...