The debate on social networks has a scientific explanation: it depends on color perception and light sensitivity.
There is a dress that can be black and blue or white and gold and it has Internet users from all over the world fighting over this difference without knowing that the answer is in their brain (and both options are correct).
Tumblr user Swiked posted a photo of a dress she had seen at a wedding, asking her followers what the color of the fabric was. “Friends, please help me. Is this dress white and gold or blue and black? “My friends and I can’t agree and we are scared,” he posted.
In response, sides have formed on Twitter: #whiteandgold and #blackandblue. The sum of these two hashtags and #thedress exceeded 700,000 tweets in less than 24 hours. It is a trending topic in English and Spanish. American TV presenter Ellen DeGeneres retweeted the image, reaching 43 thousand retweets.
The article published on the Buzzfeed site has already been read more than 20 million times. According to data published on CNN, at the height of the debate there were 670,000 people reading about this controversy at the same time . The traffic was so great that one of Buzzfeed's directors, Amy Filmore, asked her editors not to publish any more articles so that the page would remain online.
BUT WHAT IS THE TRUE COLOR?
The dress is at the limit of visual perception, according to several neuroscientists. The difference lies in how the human brain contextually interprets the information captured by the eyes. Light enters the eye through different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. Light passes through the cornea, pupil and lens and reaches the retina, where the energy is converted into nerve impulses that are carried by the optic nerve to the brain.
An explanation for the phenomenon of this dress is based on the color mixtures (subtractive and additive) that the retina processes: if you see the blue and black dress it means that the cones (cells) of the retina are highly functioning and, therefore, Therefore, people are more sensitive to light; If it is seen as white and gold, the rods of the retina (photoreceptor cells responsible for vision in low light conditions) carry out an additive mixture that results in the gold being better visualized.
"I've studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years and this is the biggest difference I've seen," said Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington.
Humans have different numbers of rods and cones and therefore see colors differently. The brain balances the white automatically.
"Our visual system is supposed to extract the information about the actual reflectance," Jay Neituz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, told Wired magazine . He added: "I've studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years and this is the biggest difference I've seen." For this expert it is white and gold.
However, a colleague at Wellesley College, Bevil Conway, sees it as "blue and orange" (not even black). And this is how he explained it: "(When viewing the image) we are trying to subtract the chromatic bias of the daylight axis. People who subtract the blue side see it white and gold; if they subtract the gold, they end up seeing blue and the black". The chromatic axis of daylight varies from red at dawn to blue-white at midday and reddish at dusk.
However, environmental conditions also influence when it comes to extracting one color or another. It is very likely that if the dress is first seen in a very bright room and then in a dark room, the differences in lighting will cause it to change color for the same person.
A curious fact is that for Google it is black and blue. If the original image is uploaded and the search engine is asked to search for "similar images", the system returns dozens of images that leave no doubt that they are composed of those colors, in particular, blue. According to Google, the image search engine uses "computer vision technology" to create a "mathematical model" of the image's main properties.
