The most viral story of the year was ‘the dress.’ A girl published a photo of a dress in February, and the world was completely split on whether it was blue and black –or white and gold.
Even more amazingly, as much as scientists tried, no one could definitively explain the phenomenon of why people saw it differently.
Scientists did weigh in and said: Your brain is constantly trying to make sense of what it sees, using the clues it’s given and the information it’s learned in the past.
So, your brain knows that a blue light shining on white makes it LOOK blue. So maybe when you saw the dress, your brain decided that’s what was happening and canceled out the blue and led you to see the base color as white.
If that’s an unsatisfying explanation . . . yeah, it should be. It still doesn’t really explain the phenomenon of the dress. Apparently it just hit this perfect visual sweet spot that no one’s ever encountered before.
