Is it an optical illusion? Rods and cones? Monitor settings? We found two neuroscientists to weigh in, and, unsurprisingly, they pointed to the brain.
This photo of a dress has caused an internet uproar: Is it blue and black, or white and gold?
Tumblr / Via swiked.tumblr.com
You can take our poll here. So far, about three-quarters of respondents see white and gold.
But why are people seeing such wildly different colors? First off, it's not monitor settings. (My husband and I looked at the same monitor and saw different colors.)
Our retinas have specialized cells called rods, which are used for night vision, and cones, which deal with color. But these cells are probably not the source of the dress dilemma.
"I would say it is highly unlikely that it is a difference between cones," said Cedar Riener, associate professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College.
Cones come in three types: red, blue, and green. And each of us has very different ratios of these types. But the different ratios "don't seem to have a big impact on our color vision," Riener said. "I could have a 5-1 ratio of red to green cones, and you could have 2-1, and we could both have similar color sensitivity."
"We are always making decisions about the quantity of light that comes into our retina," Riener said.
This light, called luminance, is always a combination of how much light is shining on an object and how much it reflects off of the object's surface, he added.
"In the case of the dress, some people are deciding that there is a fair amount of illumination on a blue and black (or less reflective) dress. Other people are deciding that it is less illumination on a white/gold dress (it is in shadow, but more reflective)."
This is just like the famous Adelson checkerboard optical illusion. In the image below, square A is exactly the same shade as square B, but they look totally different:
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