We here at SciShow love us when you ask us questions, so we'll have things to talk about,
and we get lots of great ideas that way.
But then sometimes, something weird happens on the internet, and our twitter feed becomes
completely unmanageable because the WHOLE WORLD is confused!
This dress...what?
What?!
To me, it is 100% without a doubt clearly and absolutely white and gold.
And according to this Buzzfeed poll that over two million people have taken, I am in the
majority...and the majority is wrong.
I’m Hank Green, and this is a very weird special edition of Scishow News.
[Intro]
The dress is actually blue and black, and a lot of people see it that way as well.
The difference between these groups of people probably isn’t about rods and cones and
how sensitive your eyes are, or whether you’ve spent too much time staring at the sun, as
some people have suggested.
It’s more likely simply a matter of your brain’s interpretation of the data your
eyes are sending.
The picture has just awful white balance, messing up the colors of the dress.
White balance is just the process that photographers -- or … people who make videos for a living
-- use to remove the influence of lighting on colors being captured, fixing it so that
things that appear white in person also appear white in the image.
Using that “true white” as the baseline, all of the other colors should also fall into
place, so that they look natural, too.
If you just pull the colors out of the picture and blow them up, it's neither white and gold
or blue and black; it's kinda muddy, dingy purple and orange.
So the amazing things is that no one...NO ONE!
sees the dress as the color it’s actually portrayed in the picture.
Our brains are super good at interpreting images and making sense of them even when
they aren’t accurately represented.
We can look at a browned, faded old photograph from the 70s and understand what the colors
beneath all of that degradation are.
Sometimes we enjoy doing that so much we use instagram filters that actually intentionally
mess up our pictures.
Here’s the weird thing...colors are never really themselves.
Depending on the light source, white can actually look to our eyes like blue or orange or gray
-- pure white is very uncommon.
Lighting, whether it’s the sun or halogen, incandescent, or fluorescent lights, change
the colors of the things they illuminate.
Our brains are great at perceiving the original colors underneath rather than the color that
the eyes are actually seeing.
If we couldn’t do this, the world would be hugely confusing to us.
We'd think things were changing color all the time instead of just the light changing
color.
Cameras have to figure out what “white” is based on something in the image and then
interpreting the rest of the image based on what it decided “white” was.
Here in the studio, we use this little card so that we can make sure we’re balancing
correctly and my skin doesn’t look all green and gross.
In the case of this miraculous photo of a dress, the camera did a terrible job of finding
the white balance.
So terrible that it’s actually hit a weird threshold between how different people understand
the image.
Some brains see the “white” in the image as the light color, making the darker color
gold; other brains see the image as washed out, with no white at all, so the dress is
blue and black.
Now the dress can’t be seen both ways simultaneously, so whichever way your brain is more comfortable
seeing it becomes the super obvious and objectively true way to perceive it.
And this is what it really comes down to: perception.
Our brains make trillions of little subconscious decisions like this every day, but usually
all humans make pretty much the same ones.
This image is just really great at being in between two different potential interpretations.
Why some people see it one way and not the other, could be a function of any number of
things, objectively, like, I'm not comfortable with any of the proposed hypotheses because
none of them have had any science done on them because we've known about this for like
twelve hours.
But what's driving all the chatter online, is that people have chosen up sides.
Some people are on team gold/white and others are on team black/blue.
They answer polls, and they argue with each other in the comments and like, "STOP SEEING
WHAT I DON'T SEE!"
That’s because the whole thing is really an exercise in the study of perception, and
psychologists will tell you that perception is largely about bias.
And your biases can be framed by things like expectation -- if you first saw the picture
on some facebook share, with your friend saying "How can people not see that this dress is
white and gold?!"
then your expectations were already set, and you are more apt to see it as a white and
gold as well.
And of course, we cherish our biases.
So once you've seen the dress as black and blue, it gets increasingly hard with time
to UN-see it that way -- especially the more people you're arguing with.
So the deeper truth is the one that we’re least comfortable accepting: perception of
reality is not the same thing as reality.
Our brains are good at interpreting the world around us, but they are certainly not perfect.
And we should be more comfortable with the idea that different people perceive things
differently.
And once that perception happens, it’s as real to them as our’s is to us.
Thanks for watching this very weird episode of SciShow News.
If you want to keep getting smarter with us, you can go to YouTube.com/scishow and subscribe.