Riddle blue … white dresses – BBC

Dress picture is posted on the Internet, divided the planet into two irreconcilable camps. Readers’ Gazety.Ru “can do join to worldwide debate.

Photo strange dress (pictured in the middle), lined on the eve of the portal BuzzFeed, literally blew the Internet. “Guys, help me, this dress is white, golden or blue-black? My friends and I can not come to an agreement, and we go crazy, “- wrote one girl, then mad millions of users around the world.

Few could have imagined that a simple picture can be divided Internet users into two irreconcilable camps. Some argue vehemently that clearly see the dark blue dress with black strips of lace, others – white dress with gold lace.

The problem is that three-fourths majority believe the dress is white and gold, and the rest – that blue dress or even changes its color.

Opinions celebrities also divided. Jimmy Fallon, Julianne Moore, Kim Kardashian see the white and gold dress, and Taylor Swift, James Franco, Kanye West – black and blue. In fact, this argument is not social in nature, and biology. The difference in perception due to the way the human eye and brain evolved to perceive the world, illuminated by light. Light entering the human eye falls on the retina, which is composed of two types of photoreceptors – cones and rods, which tell about the school. The sticks are more sensitive to light and more responsible for the perception of form, color and not objects. Cones, on the contrary, more responsible for the perception of color, rather than the degree of illumination of the object. In other words, at dusk we perceive the world more sticks than cones.

So, what colors are perceived by the various objects depends on what a particular person in the retina more – sticks or cones, and on how the light illuminates the subject.

Sticks perceive light intensity due to the visual pigment rhodopsin, which is very sensitive to light of low intensity and is destroyed when exposed to bright light. While its recovery requires about 45 minutes – that’s why a person needs time to get used to the normal twilight illumination.

For this reason, if a person looks at a dress at bright light, and then leave for half an hour in a dark room and come back, then, most likely, the color of dress for it to change.

«Our visual system is used to dismiss the information on the source of illumination and extract information about really reflected light. I study the individual characteristics of color vision for 30 years and in this case I see the greatest differences in individual perceptions of all that I have seen, “- says Jay Neytts, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington.

Moreover, the perception of color affects the way our brains trying to adjust color and lighting, to understand how color has actually subject. Just as the modern camera adjusts light balance, the human brain does this automatically.

But at the same sorts of people either ignore the blue shades, perceiving the image as white-gold, yellow or ignore shades, seeing blue-black dress.

A similar nature has many other optical illusions, including the famous example of a black and white checkerboard cells.

To understand the true colors of the image will photoshop.

The actual color of the dress reflect the views of the minority: Japanese picture shows that it is actually blue-black.