A serious controversy broke out on social media over a photo of a dress posted on Tumblr. Meanwhile, scientists tried to explain why for some the dress is blue-black, and for others it is white and gold.

What color is the dress: blue or white?

A dispute has flared up on the Internet about the color of the dress, a photograph of which appeared on the blog of Scottish resident Caitlin McNeil, writes MK. The problem is that three-quarters of voters believe that the dress is white and gold, the rest - that the dress is blue or even changes its color.

So, on February 25, a girl under the nickname Swiked published a photo of a dress on Tumblr and asked her friends a question about what color it was.

"Guys, help me, this is intkbbach Is the dress white and gold or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we're going crazy."

After a couple 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 girl confirmed that it was indeed blue with black stripes, the online debate did not calm down...

A photograph of a strange dress, posted the day before by the BuzzFeed portal, literally blew up the Internet, turning the topic into a media virus.

In the photo: is the dress blue or white with gold?

Scientists are interested in a dress that changes color

Meanwhile, neuroscientist from Washington State University (USA) Jane Neitz tried to explain why for some people the dress is blue-black, and for others it is white and gold.

The expert claims that the whole point is in the work of the brain, which figures out what color light is reflected from an object and separates this color from the one it considers “real”.

"Our visual system is supposed to throw out information about lighting and extract information about the color that is actually reflected," Neitz said.

It is noted that the specialist has studied color perception for 30 years. She noted that differences in the perception of dress color are the most significant in her practice.

Different people either ignore the blue tints, perceiving the image as white and gold, or ignore yellow shades, seeing the blue and black dress.

There is also an opinion. So which one color scheme how different objects are perceived depends on whether there are more rods or cones in the retina of a particular person, and on the type of light that illuminates the object.

Meanwhile, Randolph-Macon College psychology professor Cedar Riener explained that people make judgments based on how they perceive the light in a photograph differently: “Some people decide that the photo shows a blue-black dress that is well-lit (or less reflective). Others think it's a less lit white and gold outfit (it's in the shadows but more reflective)."

John Borghi, who studies cognitive neurobiology at Rockefeller University, spoke about the dependence of what a person sees in the picture on the set of his impressions and expectations, as well as on the level of attention and even eye movements, reports TSN. For example, the idea of ​​the color of a dress can be influenced by what a person looked at before.

In the photo: the real color of the much-discussed dress is blue and black

What color do celebrities think they wear?

Celebrities' opinions were also divided, reports Super.Ru. Armenian Kim Kardashian sees the dress as white and gold, and Kanye West as black and blue. Dima Bilan - white with a slight cornflower blue tint and mustard. Yana Rudkovskaya - black with lavender color. Alena Vodonaeva - lilac with mustard color. Vyacheslav Manucharov - blue and gold. Alesya Kafelnikova - white and gold. Andrey Malakhov - white and gold. Evgeni Plushenko - black and blue. Irina Dubtsova - white and gold. Alena Doletskaya - amethyst blue and chocolate. Nikolay Baskov - white and gold. Julianne Moore - white and gold. Taylor Swift - black and blue. Ksenia Borodina - white with mustard color. Lolita - black with turquoise color. Joseph Prigogine - gold and silver. Valeria - gold and silver.

Internet users' opinions about the dress were divided: the dress got its own hashtag #TheDress. However, the author of the photo had to admit that the dress was actually blue and black. That is, the published image was processed.

But while non-trivial disputes continue online about what color the dress is, the TSN.ua editors have collected the funniest comments from Internet users on social networks.

A photo of a strange dress (in the middle of the picture), posted the day before by the BuzzFeed portal, literally blew up the Internet. “Guys, help me, is this dress white and gold or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we’re going crazy,” one girl wrote, after which millions of users around the world went crazy.

Few could imagine that simple picture can divide Internet users into two irreconcilable camps. Some vehemently claim that they clearly see dark blue dress with black lace stripes, others - White dress with gold lace.

Celebrities' opinions were also divided. , they see the dress as white and gold, and , Kanye West – as black and blue. In reality, this dispute is not social, but biological. The difference in perception is explained by the way the human eye and brain have evolved to perceive the world illuminated by light. Light entering the human eye hits the retina, which consists of two types of photoreceptors - cones and rods, which are taught about in school. Rods are more sensitive to light and are more responsible for perceiving the shape rather than the color of objects. Cones, on the contrary, are more responsible for perceiving color rather than the degree of illumination of an object. In other words, at dusk we perceive the world through rods rather than cones.

The color range in which various objects are perceived depends on whether there are more rods or cones in the retina of a particular person, and on the type of light that illuminates the object.

The rods perceive light intensity thanks to the visual pigment rhodopsin, which is very sensitive to low-intensity light and is destroyed when exposed to bright light. At the same time, it takes about 45 minutes to restore it - that’s why a person needs time to get used to twilight lighting normally.

For the same reason, if a person looks at a dress in bright light, then goes into a dark room for half an hour and returns, then most likely the color of the dress will change for him.

“Our visual system is accustomed to discarding information about the light source and drawing information from the actual reflected light. I'm studying individual characteristics I've been doing color vision for 30 years and this is the biggest difference I've ever seen in individual perceptions,” says Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington.

Moreover, color perception is influenced by how our brain tries to adjust colors and lighting to figure out what color an object actually has. Just as modern cameras adjust the light balance, the human brain does this automatically.

But at the same time, different people either ignore the blue shades, perceiving the image as white and gold, or ignore the yellow shades, seeing a blue and black dress.

Many other optical illusions have a similar nature, including the famous example with black and white squares on a chessboard.

Is the dress blue or gold? There are heated discussions on the Internet about color.

People around the world are arguing over the real color of a dress, a photo of which has gone viral. social network Tumblr. And the main culprit of this phenomenon is the Scottish singer Kathleen McNeil, who posted the photo on her account.

I remember in February 2015, a friend showed me a photo of a dress on her smartphone and asked the question: “What color is it?”, at that moment I thought - why would she ask me, because her color vision is fine. At that moment I saw it blue-black (and I still see it in that color if I come across a photo phenomenon on the Internet). And imagine my surprise when she said that she saw only a white and gold dress. It was then that I started asking everyone about the color of the dress, I was interested in finding like-minded people.

As it turned out, this fun game Even world celebrities decided to play. It was interesting to see how everyone saw the dress, to compare it with themselves and roughly figure out what opinions there are more on this matter, which team you belong to.

In the original, the dress is blue with black lace. Designer Roman Originals made it in this color. But what makes people see him differently than he really is?

Scientists and doctors have dispelled the controversy and explained the reason why people think it is one color or another.

The explanation lies in the anatomical structure of the eye, namely the retina of our eye, which consists of the so-called rods and cones. These retinal elements transmit signals in their own way. For example, cones are responsible for color perception, and rods recognize a light signal. Rods respond well to shadows, twilight, darkness, and help the human eye adapt to darkness. Thus, we can conclude that we perceive the world more with rods than with cones. More details about the effect in the video below.

This is why people see different colored dresses, because the retina of each person is unique and contains a different number of rods and cones, therefore, some have more rods and some have more cones.

Don't be afraid, the fact that each of us sees differently does not mean that you have problems with nervous system or you have poor eyesight. As you know, the brain receives signals from the surrounding world through vision. By analyzing the received signal, our thinking triggers the transformation mechanism, which is why it turns out that depending on how much an object is shaded, its color is distorted.

Also, one of the theories of the dress phenomenon states that the reason lies in the reflection of light from the object. Color is determined by the wavelength of reflected light, and the brain focuses on these light waves and converts it into color. In the photograph of the dress, in addition to the dress itself, there are many objects that surround it and plus the background of the photograph itself gives an optical illusion. Our brain, processing all the colors in a photograph, cannot immediately give a definite answer, since the colors hang down and interrupt each other.

For many scientists who have devoted decades to color research, this example is the most revealing.

The unusual clue to the photograph of the blue-black or white-and-gold dress was also put forward based on a study of human volunteers. And what’s surprising is that a person who belongs to the “lark” type of person sees the dress exclusively in white and gold, and the “owl” type – in black and blue.

No matter how many theories have been put forward on this matter, every person has the right to their own vision of this photo. This once again confirms that each of us is unique.

We asked neurologists to explain the phenomenon of different perceptions of the color black and blue dress, which social media users have been discussing for the past 24 hours.

Recall that yesterday Tumblr user under the nickname Swiked, he posted a photo of the dress on his tumblog and asked for help identifying its color. According to Swiked, she and her friends cannot agree on one opinion: some see the dress as black and blue, others as white and gold. University of Washington neuroscientist Jay Neitz, who sees the dress in white and gold, says it's the largest individual difference in color perception in his 35 years of practice.

The eye perceives color through reflected light waves, explains Wired. Light hits the retina, the pigments of which process information and send it to the brain. Pigments perceive different colors depending on the wavelength of light received. In this case, the first flash of light that hits the retina can have any wavelength (that is, a different color). After the retina receives the light reflected from the object, the brain tries to “subtract” subsequent information from the data of the first flash.

Since people are active during the daytime, they perceive daylight most often. It can range from pinkish-red to blue-white and reddish. "This will happen if the visual system sees an object and tries to ignore the chromatic bias of daylight," says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at Wellesley College. “So people will either ignore the bluish and see a white and gold dress, or the yellowish and see a black and blue dress.” He is probably referring to the current lighting around the person.

Knights told Vice there are two theories. First, differences in perception may be related to age. According to him, over time, the retina of a person’s eye changes and begins to perceive less of blue color. This may explain why Knights, 61, sees a white and gold dress while his student sees a black and blue one. However, this theory does not explain differences between people of the same age.

The second assumption concerns color constancy and color lighting. Constancy of illumination means that a person will see red in both bright and dim light. But with colored lighting, the brain makes a correction. “If I walk into a room and turn on red lighting, white objects will reflect red. And if I have some red thing with me, it will also reflect red.” When processing this information, the publication explains, the brain may decide that a red object is actually white, even if it saw it as red under normal lighting.

“I observed this with my red Volkswagen,” the scientist adds. “I got into the car when it was quite dark outside, and someone in front of me turned on the brake lights. Back then my car was illuminated only by the brake lights - and it looked white!” A Vice journalist tried to transfer this theory to a photo of the dress and decided that it was taken under bluish lighting. Therefore, the brain, perceiving colored lighting, thinks that the dress is actually white.

Wired asked for a full-time designer work with a photograph and arrange individual areas according to the RGB palette. The blue areas actually turned out to be blue, but the designer attributed this to the larger area of ​​blue in the photo. At the same time, some dark areas in the picture had a palette (R 93, G 76, B 50) close to orange. The specialist associated this with the fact that we see this place on a white background and perceive it as black. If you cut it out and look at it against a black background, then the section R 93, G 76, B 50 may seem almost orange.

Knights, who saw the dress in white and gold, says the same: “I printed out the picture, then cut out a piece and looked at it out of context. The color was somewhere halfway between gold and blue, but not dark blue. It’s just that my brain thinks that there is blue in the light source, and other people’s brains that there is blue in the dress.” Conway adds: “Most people will see blue on a white background as blue. But some may see blue on a black background as white.”

Jay Knights ended his conversation with Vice by promising to dedicate the rest of his life to this phenomenon. “I thought I would be curing blindness, but now I will do this,” he said.

Today, almost the whole world is asking the question: what color is this dress? Some people see it as white and gold, and some as black and blue. And no, this is not a trick on the sites, this is the same photo (my colleague and I looked at the monitor and saw different colors).

Let's try to explain why we all see dresses of different colors.

No, it is not related to any cells in your eyes.

It's about how your brain interprets the light entering your eyes.

"We always make decisions about the amount of light that enters the retina of our eyes. This light, called brightness, is always a combination of how much light hits an object and how the light is reflected on the surface of the object," says the psychology professor Kedar Riner.

In the case of a dress, some people believe that the dress gets a large number of light and therefore it appears to them as black and blue (if not in such harsh colors, then significantly dark). And other people, deciding that a little light gets on the dress, see it as white and gold, Day.Az reports with reference to BuzzFeed.

The same trick happens with Adelson's famous chessboard shadow illusion.

Let's check. Look at the picture below, square A is exactly the same color as the squareB, but they look completely different.

Okay, but why the brain? different people interprets light differently?

Our vision largely depends on the so-called "top-down" processing - a sequential transition from general perception(recognition) of the whole to the identification in perception of its individual parts. Top-down processing starts from our brain and flows down, filtering information through our experiences and expectations. That's why we all see a different color dress.

Also, what you were looking at before you looked at the dress can influence your perception.

Another guess: Because people are active during the day, they perceive daylight most often. It can range from pinkish-red to blue-white and reddish. “This will happen if the visual system sees an object and tries to ignore the chromatic bias of daylight,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at Wellesley College. “So people will either ignore bluish and see a white and gold dress, or yellowish and see black and blue.” dress". He is probably referring to the current lighting around the person.