What colors do they see differently? A dress that is seen in different ways
Incredible facts
Anyone with normal vision will agree that blood is red, the same color as strawberries or the planet Mars. But could it be that what we call “red” is, for example, “blue” for someone else? Just recently, any scientist would have told you that people with normal vision see all colors equally.
How do we see colors? The brain processes the light that hits the eye cells, and our perception of the color of that light is associated with a universal emotional response. But recent experiments have shown that, maybe we all perceive colors differently.
In other words, your blood is the color that another person would call blue, and your blue sky will be red to someone else. But our individual perception will not affect what emotions the color of blood or sky will evoke.
This phenomenon was demonstrated in experiments on squirrel monkeys, which, like colorblind people and most mammals, have two types of cones: those that are sensitive to green and those that are sensitive to blue. That is, to them, red and green wavelengths of light appear neutral, and they cannot see red and green dots on a gray background.
Scientists from University of Washingtoninjected monkeys with a virus that allowed them to see red, as well as green and yellow. After this, the monkeys were able to perceive new information, despite the fact that their brains are not genetically programmed to perceive red signals.
Studies on monkeys dating back to 2009 showed that perception of light wavelengths is not predetermined. All this led scientists to believe that color is a personal feeling. When we are born, our neurons do not respond to color in a predetermined way, and we develop a unique color perception.
However, even though we see colors differently, our emotional response to the same colors is universal. Regardless of what you see when looking at a clear sky, it is the short wavelengths of light, which we call "blue" color, that have a calming effect on us, and the long wavelengths of light, that is, yellow, orange and red, which stimulate us. As scientists explain, our reaction to colors appeared so that all living organisms determine the cycles of day and night. So the dominance of blue light at night explains why we feel most tired at this time, and the dominance of yellow light in the morning is what makes us wake up.
website- At the end of last week, a photo appeared on the Internet that divided the world into two camps. As you may have guessed, we are talking about a magic dress. In the eyes of some people it is black and blue, in others it is white and golden... The editors have collected the facts that scientists told about.
On February 25, a girl under the nickname Swiked posted a photo of the dress on Tumblr and asked her friends a simple question about what color it was. Within a matter of hours, millions of people were divided into two camps: some claimed that the outfit was blue and black, while others said it was white and gold. But even after the author of the photo confirmed that it was indeed blue with black stripes, the debate online did not stop and continues to this day. Even scientists entered into the debate. They decided to finally explain what color the dress actually was. Washington State University neuroscientist Jane Neitz says human eyes and brains have evolved to discern colors in a sunlit world. Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths produce different colors. Light hits the retina at the back of the eye, where pigments activate neural connections in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that translates signals into images. This theory is put forward by a popular American website.
“The brain figures out what color of light is reflected from the object that the eyes see, and separates that color from the color it considers “real.” “So people don't consider the color blue, and then they see white and gold,” added Bevil Conway, another neuroscientist at Wellesley College.
For example, even what a person looked at before looking at a dress can have a direct impact on what colors they see. The level of lighting in the room in which the person is located also matters.
Lighting is very important for color recognition, which is a combination of how much light falls on an object and how much light is reflected from it. In the case of the dress, some people perceive the image as blue-black because it seems to their eye that the lighting is strong enough and there is little reflected light, others perceive more reflected color, so they see the dress as white and gold.
After this topic became so popular on the Internet, Caitlin McNeil, who published the photo, said that in fact the dress is blue and black.
“In addition to the poor quality of the image, the dispute is also explained by the way we perceive light. Our brain processes light waves of different lengths, each corresponding to a different color. As Bevil Conway, a scientist who studies color and vision, explained to Wired, daylight influences and changes the way we perceive the colors of objects. Therefore, when looking at a dress, our brain makes allowances for daylight and “cuts off” one of the undertones - bluish or yellowish. Due to the individuality of perception, it seems to some that the dress is white and gold, and to others that it is blue and black. In addition, this effect can also be explained by an optical illusion: the way we perceive the color of an object is influenced by the background on which it is located and the lighting. The photo may have been taken in bluish light, which may appear white to many."
The most detailed answer was given by Washington professor Jay Nates: “The dress appears blue-black or white-gold depending on whether your eye has more rods or cones and the lighting conditions in the room. (This is made possible by the different colors that mix around you.) Different people have different "rod" and "cone" remnants—those with color blindness are primarily affected.
But the "rods" are also very sensitive to light. The rods detect color using a pigment called rhodopsin, which is very sensitive to low light but flashes and is destroyed at higher light levels. And it should take about 45 minutes to adjust (well, just like your eyes will need time to adapt to the night, in other words). Basically, if you look at a dress in bright light and see one color, then if you go into a dark room for half an hour and come back, the dress will quite possibly change color.
Also, different dress colors among different people are associated with individual differences in color perception. If you've ever tried to work with photography, you've probably encountered white balance - the camera tries to balance it in inappropriate lighting conditions. Your brain does its own white balance, which automatically means that you either ignore the blue tint and see a white-gold image, or ignore the yellow tint and see a blue-black photo.
Ophthalmologists say that different perceptions of the color of a dress do not mean that you have problems with your eyes or mental health. Each person has individual vision characteristics. The brain processes light waves that hit the retina in a unique way, so some people see some colors and others see different colors.
There is a scientific explanation for why people see different colors in the same picture. This is an optical illusion. Objects reflect light at different wavelengths or colors, and the human brain determines color from the reflected light. Objects around you can also reflect color and influence your perception. In this photo there are many other colors around and they are mixed, and the brain cannot immediately determine the color of the dress. So, people who see dark ambient light see white instead of blue. It depends on the brain's perception process. Washington University professor Jay Neitz says he's been studying color differences for 30 years, and this case is one of the clearest differences he's ever seen. By the way, the dress seemed white to him.
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A person’s eyes are not only his soul, but also a whole world of mysteries. Why do they say that people had not seen blue before, although the Egyptians used it to color their tombs and decorations with might and main? How do some people manage to see ultraviolet radiation, while others manage to distinguish 100 million colors at once? Does creative vision really exist? There are so many questions that modern scientists must surely have answers to.
We are in website decided to find out how the vision of different people differs depending on the way of thinking, culture, time and other circumstances. Be careful, after this article you can see the world in a new light.
Why did ancient people not distinguish fuchsia from white, but confused purple with blue?
10 thousand years ago, people saw colors the same way as we do, but they used general names. Light shades were equated to white, dark shades to black. The fuchsia color was bright and light, so it stood on par with white or yellow. Purple and blue were similar and stood in the same row, equating to dark or black. Later, shades began to be distributed between red, yellow, green and blue-green colors (purple and blue fell into the category of blue-green color).
In speech, people described shades of color through context - the same way we explain taste today. The words “sweet”, “salty”, “sour”, “spicy” or “bitter” are often not enough to accurately convey the meaning, and we use qualifiers: compare, for example, the phrases “like a sour lemon” and “like sour coffee.” .
The ancient Egyptians saw the color blue, but the Greeks did not?
Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson noted that each color had a specific meaning.
For example, artists always depicted men with red-brown skin, women with light brown, and gods with gold, because they believed that the skin of gods and pharaohs was really made of gold. The exception was Osiris, who received black or green skin - a symbol of new life and resurrection. This underscored his story: he was killed by the god Set and resurrected by the goddess Isis to then rule the underworld.
Blue and light blue were the most popular colors among the Egyptians, they symbolized truth, righteousness, birth and life. The skies and waters of the fertile Nile were blue, fertility amulets and tattoos for women in the form of the god of Bes were often also blue. But the meaning of each color was inextricably tied to the context of the image.
This is more noticeable in the language of the ancient Greeks: when describing objects, they grouped them by qualities. For example, the sky was called bronze because it is dazzling, like a sword blade. The sea is purple-red, as is the wine, because they both symbolize freshness, life. But is it true that the Greeks did not distinguish the color blue?
Riddle: what did this ancient Greek statue originally look like?
Correct answer: option A.
Scientists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann have proven that ancient statues and public buildings are made in color. The pigments in the paints were mineral, but the medium itself was organic, so over time bacteria destroyed it and the paints crumbled. It turned out that our ideas about color minimalism in ancient times are far from reality. And, of course, the Greeks perfectly distinguished shades of blue, highlighting it as a separate category of color.
Based on research in 2007, American and German scientists developed an exhibition where ancient statues and buildings are presented in their original colors. It's hard to believe that hundreds of years ago ancient Greek craftsmen used such a variety of colors, decorations in the form of bronze inserts and bulging eye pupils made of black stone.
Even Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and educator of Alexander the Great, in his writings talked about 7 primary colors: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue and violet. He associated them with 7 notes and the days of the week.
Today we name 11–12 main categories of color in the language, and this indirectly indicates the degree of development of society. There are also those who easily determine the slightest difference in shades of colors and use 10 times more definitions.
For example, "chartreuse", "lime" and "shamrock" are names of green-hued flowers that look like green or light green to most. You can check how sensitive your eyes are to color using this test.
No person can distinguish blue colors until they are a year old.
The study found that children aged 4 to 8 months were faster at recognizing a green circle on a blue background than a blue circle on a blue background. These findings present scientists with a new mystery: is the ability to recognize colors innate or acquired?
Some people see 100 times more colors than others. Count how many stripes you see:
Less than 20 strips: You may have 2 types of light-sensitive cones. Like 1/4 of the world's population. You see slightly fewer colors than most. Special glasses or applications designed for all types of color blindness will help you see the full spectrum.
From 20 to 36 strips: You most likely have 3 types of light-sensitive cones. You, like most people, distinguish a large number of color shades.
More than 37 stripes: It looks like you are a tetrachromat. They have 4 types of light-sensitive cones. Such people recognize approximately 100 million colors, like bees, some birds and the artist Concetta Antico, who creates such paintings:
The presence of 4 types of cones at once is a rare mutation and occurs among women who have men in their family with color blindness. But even people with the same eyes - twins - perceive color differently. The brain itself determines color depending on mood, emotions and memories.
How to describe a color if there is no name for it in the language?
Some people have noticed that we often use different names for the same color due to difficulties in perception. Remember the riddle with the dress: some considered it white and gold, others considered it black and blue.
The Yele language, used on the island of Papua New Guinea, has a different approach to defining color. Instead of a separate name, use the name of an object that looks the same under any circumstances. For example, the word “night” means black, “cockatoo” means white, “sap” means dark red, “immature” means green, “reef water” means blue.
But even this approach will not protect you from the illusions that your own brain deliberately creates. Look at the picture and tell me what color the circles behind the stripes are:
The thing is that they are all the same color. This is the Manker-White optical illusion. Because of the multi-colored stripes in the picture, it seems that the circles are 4 different shades. Think this is an easy task now? Try to answer exactly what color the hearts behind the stripes are:
Answer: They are all the same color - yellow.
Can you hear color or see time?
Yes, the neurological phenomenon of synesthesia is also a game of our mind. Synaesthetic people imagine that the letter “D” is certainly, say, blue, and the name “Alexey” can leave a bitter taste in their mouth.
Famous synesthetes included Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Liszt, Duke Ellington and Van Gogh. If you think you are also a synesthete, test yourself and take part in research to help science understand this amazing condition.
On February 27, almost the whole world went crazy because of an ordinary, at first glance, dress - show business stars, fashion gurus, and ordinary social network users argued about what color the dress shown in the photograph was. The media promised to reveal the secret of the dress and explain why some saw a blue-black dress, while others saw a white and gold one, writes Gazeta.Ru.
It all started with a social network user. The girl published a photo of the dress that had not yet made a splash and asked her friends to help her determine its color. “Guys, please, help. We've already lost our minds with our friends and family, we can't decide the color of this dress.", she wrote. After this publication, not only she, but the entire progressive world went crazy.
What color is the dress actually?
We also joined a survey launched by the BuzzFeed portal, in which their opinions, like the opinions of the whole world, were divided into two camps. Some saw a blue and black dress in the photograph (as in all other statistics, they were a minority), others clearly saw a white and gold dress.
The author of the photo said that The dress is still blue and black, as a minority of voting participants saw it. The original photograph of the dress, in which its true color was clearly visible, was published a little later, when the whole world had time to break its brain in search of the correct answer and debates with relatives.
Why does everyone see a dress differently?
It turns out that the whole controversy is based on biological differences between people - different people saw conflicting colors in the photo because the light hit their eye photoreceptors differently. The human retina consists of two types of photoreceptors - cones and rods- the perception of color depends on which of them the light fell on. If one person's retina has more rods or cones than another person's retina, then they will see the same object in different interpretations.
Simply put, some people have more rods on their retinas, while others have more cones - this is what made the dress multi-colored in the eyes of two such people. The brain automatically interprets colors; this process is invisible to humans. If you go into a dark room and stay in it for 30-40 minutes, then upon returning the color of the dress will change for him, regardless of what color interpretation he initially saw it in. This will happen because some photoreceptors will fail temporarily, and they will recover later.
Experts report that such color illusions happen to a person all the time, but he does not notice them. You can check the true color of an object in a photograph using an image editor program, for example, using Photoshop, turning on/off the controversial shades. Some people's eyes ignore blue shades in certain lighting, while others ignore yellow ones. If a person saw a black and blue dress in a photo, then his eyes ignore yellow shades, and if a white and gold dress - blue.
