This is another illusion along the same lines:
Squares A and B are the same shade.
Indeed, Timex is overthinking it. It’s just a gussied-up version of the above illusion. We perceive A & B as different because the human vision system sucks at judging absolute brightness.
Now here’s an illusion that’s a bit more on point for the topic:
The piece in the center of both crosses? They’re both the same color. Seriously.
Bonus illusion: The angle between the cross pieces (on the 2D plane) is actually the same for all cross pieces.
And since I’m apparently really intent on distracting people who should be working, here’s a TED Talk by the guy who created it.
I wouldn’t go that far. The human visual system is pretty damn amazing. The thing is, in order to be as powerful as it is, it takes shortcuts. And once you understand those, you can exploit them.
The really interesting thing about the dress illusion is the amount of people who’ve experienced a change in how they view the initial picture. It’s one thing to know that there are hard-wired ways to fool you (most optical illusions.) It’s quite another to understand that you can actually ‘reprogram’ part of it on the fly.
This is a known about phenomenon that I linked to earlier (McCollough Effect) but it can be hard for people to wrap their heads around. Color processing is subtly different from other visual processing, because the conditions in which we’ve learned to understand similar colors can wildly vary (dark night, bright sun, in the shade, etc.) and what we see as color itself isn’t a thing. There are specific colors that we can say are x wavelength of light, but as you can see, in other contexts the same wavelength of light can look wildly different to our eyes.
Yeah, it’s still your brain trying to make sense of little colored dots, using what it knows about the real world.
Is there (as far as we know) a “learning” element to this process? e.g., is the brain building up a knowledge-set of how to handle these corner cases as we age? For instance, would an infant not be affected by some of these illusions as much, or differently?
Probably a bit of both. Your vision system is going to be fooled by grey-on-light/grey-on-dark illusions no matter what, but the speaker in the above-linked TED video does make a point of the large role the brain plays in interpreting the raw data from the eyes.
It’s complicated and research is still ongoing, but evidence points to color perception being intimately related to language. It’s very counter-intuitive, but it seems the very language we use changes how we interpret the world.
Ahem.
In his introduction, Deutscher writes that most respectable psychologists and linguists think that the influence our mother tongue has on the way we think is negligible, or trivial.
Regardless of what you think about the role of language, I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that language constrains color perception. Rather, language constrains color categorization. In other words, two colors that I consider different shades of “blue” might be considered two completely different colors, “синий” and “голубой”, by someone who grew up speaking Russian.
That’s not too controversial. However, the underlying issue is how people split a rainbow into distinct color labels. There are no dividing lines found in nature. Are some labels are hardwired, or “universal”? For instance, is it possible for someone to have no concept of “red”, except as a shade of orange? A few decades ago some researchers suggested that all languages have a word for “red”, unless they don’t name colors at all. This strongly implies that red is universal, constrained by the visual system we all share. Later, someone tried to refute that argument, and the debate has gone on since then.
Pretty awesome!
Here’s another one:
The only color in this image is red.
I don’t agree it’s just a version of those optical illusions. With those we all agree what the illusion is. But with the dress we can both be staring at it and see it as different sides in that optical illusion, because it exposes some really weird threshold that some people lie on one or the other side of. I think that’s pretty noteworthy.
I was also more startled seeing the image toggle right in front of me between extremes than I am by seeing those optical illusion demonstrations, so it’s more notable in that respect too. It’d be interesting to see if someone could modify the example illusions to have the same back-and-forth effect, or to split the audience, in the same way. And as noted above it’s also really intriguing that you can ‘learn’ to see the dress one way or another.
Arise for the new hotness! Yanny or Laurel?
I wonder if this one is exacerbated by the format of the audio. Some explanation I half skimmed said it had to do with high and low frequencies, and that “Laurel” was more likely for older people who typically can’t hear higher frequencies as well as younger people.
But I’ve seen this as a video embedded in a tweet, in SoundCloud, in a video in a Guardian Article, and I wonder if there are encoding and compression differences being introduced as it spreads, because your post is the only time I’ve clearly heard “Yanny” so far. In that post I heard Yanny clearly and primarily, but letting it loop over time I could switch back and forth between hearing Yanny and Laurel. But those soundcloud and other videos have always been nothing but Laurel, no matter how many times I play it, with no hint of Yanny at all.
If it really is something related to frequencies out there in the ranges that lots of people can’t hear, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s also a range highly impacted by how the audio is encoded. In contrast, the black/blue dress image quality could be affected by being shared and re-saved via lossy image formats, but you’d have to do a lot more of that to start dramatically shifting the actual color of the image.
I could be completely wrong about that though.
I’ve only ever heard Laurel. Yanny folks smokin’ crack.
Weirdly I’m hearing both at once out of my phone speaker. There’s a deeper, more throaty voice saying Laurel, while there’s this higher pitched, nasal voice saying Yanny.
One is the human vessel, the other is the demon that possesses it.
Few like you remain, traveler. How long have you been gifted such? At night, when ashg narfleur, b’zarp on hackfleish remit.
Yeah, when I listen to it expecting Yanny it sounds… odd. Wrong, somehow. When I listen to it expecting Laurel it’s clear as a bell, to me.
I only hear Yanny. More like Yenny actually. Even when I try, I can’t hear Laurel.
I hear both at one. Low pitched Laurel, high pitch Yahney.