The Psychology Behind The Dress
How #thedress broke the internet, and our brains.
On February 7, 2015, Cecilia Bleasdale posted a picture that broke the internet, divided families and friends, and scared Mindy Kaling.
Breaking the internet takes a lot of work. People go naked to break the internet. They spill blood to break the internet at least once in life. Not Cecilia though. She simply posted a picture of a dress.
That was all it took. Within a few days, wars were breaking out digitally. People were certain the dress was blue and black, while others were equally certain that it was white and gold. People who had a life did not care.
The internet was in absolute chaos and wherever there is chaos, there is psychology.
Vision scientists swooped in to try and understand what was happening. Why was a simple picture able to divide people so sharply?
Before we go ahead though, how about seeing how my audience is divided over the dress?
Decoding The Dress
When the chaos subsided, people started trying to understand what was it that caused such different interpretations of the same picture. Some suggested Vit. D deficiency was involved, others believed it was a matter of gender.
Pascal Wallisch, a data scientist at New York University was not convinced. Wallisch’s work involves how humans construct the subjective reality around them. It was no surprise that the issue of “The Dress” was right up his alley.
The Dress posed a fundamental problem. The exact same stimulus was being perceived in completely different ways by people. Both the groups were certain they were right and they couldn’t explain how.
As Mindy Kaling put it, the dress posed an existential threat to “objective truth”. Psychologists have known for some time that “the objective reality” we live in, is not that objective.
We create the world around us in our own eyes, based on our past experiences and assumptions about the world. The Dress just demonstrated this concept to the whole world.
Color Constancy and Visual Ambiguity
The human brain is constantly processing loads of information at any given time. Out of all this info, very little actually makes it to our conscious experience. For eg. your nose is always in your field of vision but your brain simply ignores it.
Similarly, our brain maintains the color constancy of everyday objects through different kinds of illumination. Here is an example.
You might see the mug above as uniform blue, when in fact, it has different shades in different parts of the mug because of how it is illuminated. The brain is ignoring the different shades of parts of this mug because of how it believes the mug is illuminated.
So, instead of appearing as a mix of different colors, you simply see the mug as homogenously blue. Your brain has “tricked” you in some senses.
Similarly, in this photo, there are no red pixels.
But do you still see the strawberries as red? That’s because your brain fills the colors in automatically.
The exact same thing happens in the dress as well.
If you look at it closely, it is not clear how the dress is illuminated. It might have a natural source of light or an artificial one.
And that is where the brain fills in information depending on past experience. If you have higher exposure to artificial light, you assume an artificial source of light and vice versa.
THAT is what the whole drama was all about. The dress, and the color you see in it, depends on how much exposure you have to a source of light.
But here is where things get even more interesting.
Owls, Larks, and The Dress
Pascal Wallisch, who we discussed before had another idea. People who stay up late at night (called owls) have higher exposure to artificial light. Those who get up early (called larks) have more exposure to natural light.
Is it possible that the color we see in the dress can be explained by our sleeping habits?
YES! Yes, it can.
In his study involving 13,000 people, Wallisch found that those who stayed up late at night reported seeing the dress as blue and black, while those who woke up early saw it as white and gold.
You can read his whole paper here.
Doesn’t it surprise you that so much of the world we see around us is simply a projection of our own lives and lifestyles? We like to think that we are objective observers of the world but we are quite fallible. The dress exposed our fallibility quite clearly.
It is also why so many topics of debate in politics, science and policy rarely lead to meaningful change. We refuse to see the world from the point of view of someone else.
The dress may have divided the world at one point but we must not forget what it taught us. Our senses are imperfect. We are imperfect. The world is not what it seems.
And that is it for this week! Breaking down the dress was a lot of fun. I have always seen it as blue and black but my mom (who wakes up at 6 AM) was sure it was white and gold. Finally, I have an answer to why it happened.
The Dress may have been the perfect accidental illusion but it is not the only one. Here is another divisive picture. What color is the shoe? Is it mint green and grey or white and pink?
You can let me know by replying to this email or in the comments :)
Until next time,
Arjun
I can already hear my mom shouting from the other room, "Your phone is the problem. Aur karo 3 am tak phone use, now you can't even identify colours"
Hear me out-The dress is Blue and Gold.