


(For example, there is a predominance of long wavelengths in the early morning and late afternoon, versus more short wavelengths at noon.) The brain instead strives for “ color constancy”-recognizing the same object as having the same color no matter what the time of day-and it is doing a pretty good job at that. The brain is not primarily interested in the correct representation of hues, but rather the identification of objects in light of dramatically varying conditions. This is an inherently ambiguous situation, so the brain has to make a decision about whether to take the appearance of an object at face value or to discount part of the information as stemming from the illumination. Do you see the dots moving from left to right or up and down? This week, it was recognized by masses of people on the Internet, who have been debating furiously over what should be a simple question: What color is this dress?Ī bi-stable motion stimulus. This has been recognized for at least 150 years, since the time of Hermann von Helmholtz. In other words, the brain is playing a game of telephone and-contrary to popular belief-our perception corresponds to the brain’s best guess of what is going on in the outside world, not necessarily to the way things actually are.

So the brain relies on the eyes to supply an image of the outside world, but there are many processing steps between the translation of light energy into electrical impulses that happens in the eye and the neural activity that corresponds to a conscious perception of the outside world. The completely light-tight nature of the skull renders this home a place of complete darkness. If you are just encountering The Dress for the first time, you might first want to click here to see what all the fuss was about.
