The Dress Explained

It was the dress meme that broke the internet and shook our assumptions of “what is even real anymore!?” What’s most interesting is what this mystery reveals about the nature of our perceptions and subjective reality.

The dress debate started with a Tumblr post of a two-toned dress with the caption: “Guys please help me, is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking … out.”

Responses ensued on whether the dress color was white and gold or blue and black, dividing friends and families.

The onslaught of tweets and blog posts from celebrities to news media polarized a nation. We tried it at an extended family gathering, passing along a photo of the dress and witnessing radically different perceptions come forth of the same darn thing!

The Dress Explained by Science

When the scientists and researchers weighed in, we finally got a glimpse of what was causing such different views of the same thing. It’s a mystery of how radically different our perceptions can be and how ambiguous our reality actually is.

Here’s The Best Video Explanation of How We See the Dress through our perception of color…

For even more about the dress color and optical illusions, check out this article: http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm

In a recent HuffPost article on How Brain Science Explains The Dress, Neuroscientist Michael Buice writes…

The human mind has a marvelous capacity for inventiveness… it turns out that this inventiveness is actually necessary for a more fundamental reason. Your brain is forced into being creative in order to perform the simple act of seeing the world around you… Because of nothing more than light and geometry, a given image can have an infinite number of possible causes in the real world… Faced with this dilemma, the brain must resort to inference. Essentially, it must make guesses, albeit educated ones. One consequence of this is that while we all live in the same world, we don’t always see it the same way.

Perceptions & World Views

If “we don’t always see (the world) the same way,” the real question is how do our perceptions, the way we see reality, affect our life and relationship with others. Check out these articles & videos as we get more into optical illusions, perspective, and world views…

What is Real? – Optical Illusions & Virtual Reality

Optical Illusions Reveal How We See the World

Break Free to Feel More Connected