The Dress - amazonia.fiocruz.br

The day after a viral BuzzFeed post asked about the color of a certain striped cocktail dress, neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch pulled up the infamous photo on his laptop and showed it to his wife.

So I realized immediately that nothing that we know about color vision could explain this. This research has coalesced on an The Dress explanation : The color you see on the The Dress depends on the unconscious assumptions your brain makes about the light shining on it. People who assume that the dress is in shadow — that is, basking in blue light — will usually see it as yellow, presumably because their brains are subconsciously subtracting blue from the scene Dresx take the shadow into account. No one knows exactly, but Wallisch provides one answer in a study published earlier this year. Surveying more than 13, people — the largest published study of The Dress to date — he finds that early risers tend Dreess see the frock as gold and white, whereas night Drwss are slightly more likely to see it as blue and black.

This makes sense, he says, because people who wake up early are, over their lifetimes, exposed to more blue light from the sky than are people who tend to stay up into the night, surrounded by artificial yellow light. For about a month after The Dress appeared, Wallisch said, it was all he and his colleagues could talk about. It was and still is one of the The Dress images known to produce such striking differences in color perception from one The Dress to another. The dress effect is probably not inherited. The genetic testing company 23andMe polled about The Dress, of its customers about how they saw the photo, and found no genes that could predict color perception.

That suggests that genes have some influence on how we see The Dress, but that most of the effect is driven by our environment and life experiences.

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The difference, Wallisch guesses, The Dress be because the first survey, coming out so soon after The Dress, had more trolls lying about what they saw. He did not discard any data points from either survey. The noisy data showed up in his own family: Wallisch is an extreme owl, staying up into all hours of the night, but he saw the dress as gold and white, the opposite of what his paper would predict. And his lawyer wife wakes The Dress early, but saw it as blue Dresz black.

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Other researchers found the new study valuable, particularly because its two surveys included large groups of people The Dress replicated each other. Feldman Barrett, author of Dreess Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brainnoted that this is but one example of many in which our brains use the accumulation of past experiences to make judgments about the present.

Perhaps more interesting than the science of The Dress, Purves said, is the fact that tens of millions of people cared so much about it. Contact Virginia Hughes at virginia. Got a confidential tip? The Dress

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