“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality … we’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.” Patrick Cavanagh, neuroscientist and research professor at Dartmouth College
Do you remember “The Dress”?
Take The Dress — yes, the hideous little either black-and-blue or white-and-gold garment — had the internet bewildered and frenzied over its real color combination. No matter which camp you are in — blue-black or white-gold, you might wonder how things like this could happen and why others couldn’t see what I saw?
Well, here is the news: color is not real and all colors are mere illusions. The sky is not blue on most days, the sky is not red at sunrise and sunset, and the sky is not black at night.
Color is not an inherent property of objects and does not exist in the physical world. Color exists in a similar way art or love exists, as some physicists put it, it is created with imagination. Color is a way that objects appear to us and are perceived by us.
How is something not real when it feels so real?
The perception of color, like the perception of time, is one of the most fascinating, nonintuitive psychological experiences.
The true color of colors
A story of light and brain
Despite the unique experience of color, it is the entire construction or projection of our brain when we interact with the environment. It is a complex neural process that involves converting, through our visual nervous systems, different wavelengths and intensities of light bouncing off objects to electrochemical signals. Our brain then encodes those signals and outputs impressions of colors.
Neither objects nor lights are colored. Unlike mass, color is not an inherent property of things. Objects appear to us as red or blue because our brain labels certain spectral distributions of light as red or blue.
In light of this, color does not exist. What exists is light and energy. Light is real and energy is real.
Ok, let’s go back to The Dress? Some scientists are fascinated by The Dress just as much as we are, probably for different reasons. They think the lighting condition may be what causes the color mystique.
A story of evolution and prediction
As we all experienced, different lighting conditions that would make objects appear in different colors. And since the color is perception, different people perceive it differently. The picture of The Dress was taken under ambiguous lighting conditions, which prompts our brain to work hard to clarify the ambiguities.
The frontal lobes of the brain, the area where higher-level thinking occurs, have functions such as anticipation and decision-making. “There’s a whole world of visual analysis and computation and prediction that is happening outside of the visual system, happening in the frontal lobes, …” said neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a professor at Dartmouth College in Canada.
And processing the whole world of information transmitted from our visual systems to the frontal lobes takes time. To compensate this slowness, albeit only a millisecond difference, our ancestors developed an amazing ability — throughout millions of years living in the jungle — to predict predators’ path of motion, which allowed them to act quickly without doubts and hesitations.
Thanks to the legacy of evolution, our brain likes to make predictions as much as possible, especially when the situation—be it a photo, a motion or an event — is uncertain. It unconsciously fills in the gaps using our prior experiences to ease the anxiety of uncertainties or meeting our desires or expectations, sometimes at the cost of distorting reality.
That is why the different “stories” of The Dress are created. Different people have different life experiences. According to Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University, an early bird would align her/his past experience — exposure to a lot of sunlight — with the image and most likely saw The Dress as white and golden. Sunlight contains a lot of blue and morning people automatically filter it out, and what is left is yellow. Vice versa, a night awl would presume the picture was taken under the artificial light and often perceived The Dress as blue and black.
To sum up
Our perception, or illusion, of colors, helps us to distinguish features of the environment and identify the dangers of the surroundings essential to our survival, but this does not necessarily reflect the physical reality, just as The Dress shows.
How do we know what’s real? Well, the purpose of this article is not to sow doubts in our mind to distrust everything and anything coming through our senses, but to provoke a realization of the limits of our brain, to promote an understanding of different perspectives and hence to live with more humility and empathy.
The final verdict: The Dress isn’t black-blue or white-gold, as there is no such thing as black or blue or white or gold.
Key points
- Color does not exist
- Color is perception
- Color is the result of evolution
References
“Reality” is constructed by your brain
Do colors exist outside our brain