Photos that each people see differently. Red is the main color for humanity. Riddle: what this ancient Greek statue looked like in the original

The start of the "viral debate" was given by the publication on the Tumblr website: the owner of the dress decided to ask the opinion of Internet users about its color after she discovered such disagreements among her loved ones. The answers were diametrically opposite: from blue with black to white and gold. At the same time, for those who see the outfit as dark, it is difficult to believe that the “opponent” is not joking and in reality sees the clothes shown in the photo are light (and vice versa).

A photo with a corresponding question immediately flew around the virtual space. Even the stars gave their version of color perception: for example, Kim Kardashian saw the white and gold version, Lady Gaga spoke in favor of blue and sand, and Taylor Swift is sure that the dress is blue and black. In just the first day of publication on one of the sites, BuzzFeed, the photo received 28 million views.

Now it is already known for sure that the dress is made in dark colors (this was shown by the analysis of the picture with the help of professional photographic tools, and the recognition of the owner of the "controversial clothing"), but those who see the dress as light still find it hard to believe. Scientists talked about the reason for this optical illusion.

The color perception system developed in humans in the process of evolution. We have developed day vision, in which we distinguish all the elements of the world around us, including color. Light enters the eye through the lens, reaching the retina at the back of the eye. Different wavelengths activate neural connections in the visual cortex in different ways, which translates signals into images. Night vision allows us to see the outlines and movement of objects, but their colors are lost.

However, even in daylight, color perception is not always unambiguous: under different lighting conditions, the color gamut of an object is perceived differently, and the brain also takes this into account. One and the same color at dawn may seem to us pink-red, during the day - white and blue, and at sunset - red. The brain makes a decision about the "reality" of the color, in each case making an allowance for concomitant factors.

This explains the difference in the perception of the same image by different people. Those who mistake the background light for sunlight assume that the dress is in shadow, so the highlights are obviously blue. Someone in the same bright light is more accustomed to seeing the whiteness of the dress. This is the most common version.

However, the brain of about 30% of people does not take into account the light in the background at all - and in this case the dress looks blue to him, and the gold fragments then “turn” black. Each person has his own visual experience, his own level of concentration, his own specific eye movements. The level of illumination in one's own environment, the color scale of objects, which the brain fixed before switching attention - all this taken together gives a difference in perception.

Scientists have known this factor for a long time. But by itself, fundamental scientific knowledge does not attract such wide public attention: this became possible only during the period of the widespread development of the Internet in combination with an interesting topic for discussion. Washington State University neuroscientist Jay Neitz told Wired.com that he has been studying individual differences in color perception for 30 years. According to him, the current example is the most revealing in all the years of his research. By the way, Neitz himself sees the dress as white and gold.

19 replies

Still, most see the same way.

Yes, we can distinguish some shades, some do not. Even some colors (usually green / red) are difficult to distinguish among some - color blind. This is determined by the number and ratio of the eye's color-sensitive elements - "cones" and "rods".

Yes, we can distinguish some shades, but we do not know how to name them, and therefore, for us it is one color.

So, for example, for me all mushrooms are just mushrooms, although I can distinguish them, I cannot name them.

But there is another situation - when the northern peoples see the same snow as we do, but they have names for different shades of snow, but we do not. This means that we distinguish a part, but we cannot name, and we do not distinguish a part, because the eye also trains in the ability to distinguish shades.

Color is a very important component of vision in terms of information content. Temperature, maturity, unspoiledness (decay processes have not begun), non-toxicity - all these are animals, and then a person must be instantly identified by color. By the color of the skin - face, ears - animals, and then a person, instantly distinguish the emotional state of a person, aggression, deception, fear. People, too often (especially in the past), and animals even now, who are mistaken in the perception by color, and therefore in the interpretation of information, simply did not survive. So, after all, there are differences in the perception of colors, but they are not essential for mutual understanding and survival.

I will add, I recently answered another question:

After all, colors do not exist each by itself:

Color is an evaluative subjective concept, a sensation created by our brain when analyzing the signals produced by the retina of the eye when light rays hit it. Vision is one of the senses, and like all human senses, it is subjective.

People can actually perceive colors in different ways. But the variability in color perception is not great, except in cases of developmental disorders, such as color blindness - the inability to perceive one or more colors.

In the world around us, there is no such physical concept as "color". Objects and light sources do not have their own color, they only reflect or emit light with a certain wavelength, which we perceive as "color".

Experiment: Take something red and not glossy and shine a light on it through an opaque green bag. What color will you see?

And as an example of the subjectivity of color perception, we can cite the recent meme "dress phenomenon":

Its essence is that for some the dress in the photo seems golden-white, and for others it is blue-black. Its true color is blue-black.

Light itself is a small part of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation perceived by our eyes. It is known that, for example, birds can also see near ultraviolet radiation.

The color characteristic of an object is the result of the work of the visual system. It consists of the eyes, optic nerves and areas of the brain responsible for vision.

First of all, the perception of color depends on the number and functioning of rods and cones (retinal photoreceptor cells), which can vary in the same way as, say, hair growth or color.

The rods have a high light sensitivity, but from the color spectrum they are only able to perceive the emerald green part. There are three types of cones and are responsible for the perception of color: red, green, blue. The cones require a substantially higher level of illumination to operate than the rods. This explains why a person does not perceive colors in the dark.

In addition to the features of the development of the eye, the human brain itself plays a huge role, because it is he who analyzes the information and forms the final picture.

The result depends on various factors: illumination, color temperature of lighting, color of surrounding objects and background, and others.

I advise you to watch an informative video about this:

Is Your Red The Same as My Red?

[original in English]

[Russian voice-over translation]

I’ll tell you more than that, and you, of course, can not attach much importance to my words, because it sounds like an absurdity: we are generally able to "see" (see) around us only what we "hammered in" (everything that the brain remembered and stores in the form of memory) into our heads and nothing else.

I think one can recall such a concept as "Qualia", but it belongs to the field of philosophy and is considered controversial, has many supporters and opponents. And it explains exactly the subjective perception of color.

For example, you are looking at the cover of this question right now. For you, this is only green and no other. Another person also looks at the cover and sees it in green too. But for him, green is like for you, for example, blue. He sees it as a shifted (but only for you, everything is in order for him) spectrum. He just sees about you, or rather feels it like that. That is, everything in the world that is green to you is like blue to you. But he used to call this color green and no other, the way he was taught from childhood. And you, in fact, will never be able to know how exactly he feels this color. You can try to associate with the association: "This cover is the same color as the grass." But for this person, both she and the grass are of the same color, and he calls it green, as he was again taught.

Now imagine that each of us sees the world in a certain color palette, which is different from the palette of any other person. And it is Qualia that allows the supporters of this idea to realize the illusory, virtuality of their world.

There is a complication here. What is color perception. Receptors give more or less the same results at the output because they are similarly arranged. There is some variation, but it is not essential. There are anomalies, but they are predictable (color blindness). * That is, if a person is color blind, then we can come to understand how his perception is different. This is proved by the color blindness test. A person with normal vision draws tables in such a way that a color blind person sees figures (from separate colored elements) that a person with standard vision cannot see! This is important to understand. In the tables, not only does a color blind person not distinguish something, but also sees something drawn especially for him.

The questions of what color is were discussed several times, in order to understand it is worth reading everything and critically:

So, with the receptors and the signal that they eventually gave, everything is more or less clear. What's next? What is the correspondence between the signal, physical changes in the brain (neural connections) and our idea of ​​color (what is red)?

The answers mention Chernigovskaya, which refers to Sechenov:

So, I repeat once more: between the actual impression with its consequences and the recollection of this impression, from the side of the process, in essence, there is not the slightest difference.

That is, redness is an experience of sensations that we reproduce every time we turn to it. And the experience is more or less similar in the same receptor structure.

That is, to check without asking a person to show red from a set of multi-colored objects (here we will prove that we have one experience), but to get into the brain, find "redness" and make sure that it is the same with ours.

Here we come to the concept of consciousness and whether it comes down to material.

Judging by the fact that Tatiana Chernigovskaya

he will raise this topic many times in his speeches, precisely in the form of an "interesting question without an answer", there have been no academic studies. Moreover, from the context of her remarks, it follows that at the moment it is not even clear how it could be found out.

Although, in my opinion, the recent story with "what color of the dress" answered it quite definitely.

Still no. And the point is not only in color blindness, in which a person hardly distinguishes exactly shades of green, but in the perception of color. For example, the vests of the traffic police seem to me green, and most people see them yellow. However, as already answered above, this feature of perception is not critical.

Satisfactorily answer (or find answers) to questions about life, the universe and all that, I at least learned to do it)) Accordingly, I do not see any particular problems with the answer to the question about the relationship of color perception with the naming of colors, given here as an example of the “question, which is almost impossible to answer. " What really worries me is:

Why is the interface for providing basic human needs so crooked?

Why does society not only demand respect for its archaic shrines, but also oblige to choose an object of reverence, find fellow worshipers and go to tell everyone about it?

Interest Ask. Even without reading the answer of Ivan Bulaev, I thought to write the same thing, only in the other direction. How many will be remembered is not interesting, although the fate of the children is interesting. I would like, on the contrary, to learn everything about my ancestors (and from some depth starting not mine, but our common ones) to the very beginning, although it is not only possible to learn, but also to realize it is hardly possible) , to recognize in themselves their features, to find out how they lived, what they rejoiced, what they grieved about.

But about "What if we see different colors, but we call them the same," I doubt it. Yes, this is a well-known example, but this is what it seems to me, although I may be wrong. After all, colors do not exist each by itself:

To measure a color means to express it in terms of some quantities and thereby determine its place in the whole set of colors within the framework of a certain system of their expression or mathematical description.

Here's an example of one of the color space systems:

If we each imagined colors in an arbitrary way, how could we arrange them next to each other in the same way in a certain correspondence? To make a thousand-piece puzzle from such a cone or other color space scheme, is it hard for us, but will we put it together?

An example of a different color space:

Black should be black for everyone, white for everyone should be white, you can agree on how they look, describe through something else. Black is the absence of light. White - maximum brightness (take a bright LED flashlight, shine a light on the keyboard, tell me what color it is). And black and white are two points (areas) in the color space, uniquely defined. Yes, I agree, this is not quite enough, but at least something.

You can't. The analogue of the perception of color between the male and female brains is well shown in the program, A Beautiful Mind, though I don't remember the issue.

So, in that program, they gave 6 shades of color and asked to determine how many shades there are, men could name 3 by force, women - 6. As a result, it turned out that there are 6 shades, but at the same time gave an answer to your question.

Most likely you have already seen this dress, and you probably have your own opinion about its colors. But the whole world still cannot come to an unambiguous opinion. For some, it is invariably blue-black, for others - white and gold and nothing else!

There were even cases when at first it seemed to a person that the dress was of the same color, and then after some time he was sure of the opposite!

This dress has already done too much trouble. It's time to face the truth and find out what color it really is.

The very photo of the dress, because of which there is so much controversy:

According to some, the original dress, if the lighting was better, should look like this:

Others believe that if it were not for the excessive light, the dress would be like this:

But why do people see different colors in the same photo? There is one version on this score, and it has nothing to do with monitor settings, nothing depends on them, we checked.

It's all about how the eyes of each individual person react to the illuminated object. Some people decide that the dress is not sufficiently lit (or that its surface reflects light strongly) and their brain sends a signal to their eyes to compensate for this. Hence the white and gold color. Others think that too much light is falling on the dress (or the surface is less reflective), and their eyes show them that it is blue-black.

Everything is like in the famous optical illusion of Adelson. In the picture, square "A" is the same color as square "B", although it seems that this is not so.

In general, it turns out that a person's eyes see the image as the brain perceives it. Past experience is also important. If a person has seen a fabric of a similar texture or a similar dress of a certain color, this will most likely affect what color he sees in the photo with the dress. Little is known about this phenomenon, called "difference in perception".

And here is a photo of a real dress. It still turned out to be blue-black.

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A person's eyes are not only his soul, but also a whole world of mysteries. Why do they say that before people did not see blue, although the Egyptians with might and main used it to color their tombs and decorations? How do some people manage to see ultraviolet radiation, while others - to distinguish 100 million shades at once? Is there really a creative vision? There are so many questions that modern scientists must surely have answers to.

We are in website decided to find out how the vision of different people differs depending on the way of thinking, culture, time and other circumstances. More accurately, after this article, you can see the world in a new light.

Why did the ancient people not distinguish the color of fuchsia from white, and confused purple with blue?

10 thousand years ago, people saw colors in the same way as we do, but they used generic names. Light shades were equated to white, dark shades - to black. The color of fuchsia was bright and light, therefore it was on a par with white or yellow. Purple and blue were similar and stood in the same row, equating to dark or black. Later, the shades began to be distributed between red, yellow, green and blue-green colors (purple together with blue fell into the category of blue-green).

In speech, people described shades of color through context - the way we explain taste today. The words “sweet”, “salty”, “sour”, “spicy” or “bitter” are often not enough to convey the meaning accurately, and we use a clarification: compare, for example, the phrases “like sour lemon” and “like sour coffee” ...

Did the ancient Egyptians see the color blue, but the Greeks didn't?

Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson observed that there was a specific meaning for each color.

For example, artists have always depicted men with reddish-brown skin, women with light brown, and gods with gold, because they believed that the skin of the gods and pharaohs was really made of gold. The exception was Osiris, who received black or green skin - a symbol of new life and resurrection. This highlighted his story: he was killed by the god Set and resurrected by the goddess Isis in order to then rule the afterlife.

Blue and cyan colors were the most popular among the Egyptians, they symbolized truth, truth, birth and life. The heavens and waters of the fertile Nile were blue, fertility amulets and tattoos for women in the form of the god Bes were more often also blue. But the meaning of each color was inextricably linked to the context of the image.

This is more noticeable in the language of the ancient Greeks: when describing objects, they grouped them according to their qualities. For example, the sky was called bronze because it is dazzling like the edge of a sword. The sea is purple-red, like wine, because they both symbolize freshness, life. But is it true that the Greeks did not distinguish between blue?

Riddle: what did this ancient Greek statue look like in the original?

Correct answer: option A.

Scientists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann have proven that antique statues and public buildings are colored. The pigments in the paints were mineral, but the carrier itself was organic, so over time the bacteria destroyed it and the paints crumbled. It turned out that our ideas about the minimalism of color in ancient times are far from reality. And, of course, the Greeks perfectly distinguished the shades of blue, making it a separate color category.

Based on research, in 2007, American and German scientists developed an exhibition featuring antique statues and buildings in their original colors. It is hard to believe that hundreds of years ago, ancient Greek masters used such a variety of colors, decorations in the form of bronze inserts and bulging pupils of eyes made of black stone.

Even Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and educator of Alexander the Great, in his writings talked about 7 basic colors: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue and purple. He associated them with 7 notes, and the days of the week.

Today we name 11-12 basic categories of color in the language, and this indirectly indicates the degree of development of society. There are those who can easily identify the slightest difference in shades of colors and use 10 times more definitions.

For example, “chartreuse,” “lime,” and “shamrock” are the names for a green hue, which to most looks like green or light green. You can check how sensitive your eyes are to color using this test.

Not a single person distinguishes blue colors until a year

Research found that children aged 4 to 8 months recognized a green circle on a blue background faster than a blue circle on a blue background. These findings have presented scientists with a new conundrum: is the ability to recognize colors innate or acquired?

Some people see 100 times more colors than others. Count how many stripes you see:

Less than 20 strips: you may have 2 types of light-sensitive cones. Like 1/4 of the world's population. You can see slightly fewer colors than most. Special glasses or applications designed for all types of color blindness will help you see the full spectrum.

20 to 36 strips: you most likely have 3 types of light-sensitive cones. You, like most people, can distinguish a large number of color shades.

More than 37 strips: you seem to be among the tetrachromats. They have 4 types of light-sensitive cones at once. Such people recognize about 100 million colors. like bees, some birds and the artist Concetta Antico, who creates such paintings:

The presence of 4 types of cones at once is a rare mutation and occurs among women who have men with color blindness in their family. But even people with the same eyes - twins - perceive color differently. The brain itself determines the color based on mood, emotions and memories.

How to describe a color if the language does not have its name?

Some people have noticed that we often use different names for the same color due to the difficulty of perception. Remember the riddle with the dress: some considered it white and gold, others black and blue.

The Yele language used on an island in Papua New Guinea takes a different approach to defining color. Instead of a separate name, they use the name of an object that looks unchanged under any circumstances. For example, the word "night" means black, "cockatoo" - white, "juice" - dark red, "immature" - green, "reef water" - blue.

But even this approach will not protect you from the illusions that your own brain deliberately creates. Look at the picture and tell me what color the circles by stripes are:

The point is that they are all the same color. This is a Munker-White optical illusion. Because of the multi-colored stripes in the picture, the circles appear to be 4 different shades. Think this is an easy task now? Try to answer exactly what color the hearts are behind the stripes:

Answer: they are all the same color - yellow.

Can you hear the color or see the time?

Yes, the neurological phenomenon of synesthesia is also a game of our mind. People-synesthesia imagine that the letter "D" is certainly, say, blue, and the name "Alexei" can cause a bitter taste in their mouths.

Famous synesthetics were Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Liszt, Duke Ellington and Van Gogh. If you think you are synesthetic too, test yourself and take part in research to help science understand this amazing state.

Have you ever enthusiastically argued with your beloved about the actual color of your blouse or shirt? Have you been surprised to hear that a thing that you sincerely considered green is perceived by someone else as blue?

Color recognition is a subtle thing, we all have our own characteristics that affect how our brains interpret visual information. There is no correct answer to the question "blue or green" in this case, since different people can perceive the same shade of color in different ways.

In order to avoid confusion, there is a color shade coding system (RGB model). From a technical point of view, each color is a mix of three tones - red, green and blue (red, green, blue), and the final shade depends on which of the tones is present in the shade in what quantity. However, the human brain sometimes interprets this mix very freely, and this is related to the difference in the perception of the same shade by different people.

Experiment

An experiment conducted by scientists at Optical Express has shown this difference very clearly. What color do you think this square is - blue or green? Or so: for you personally, this color rather blue than green, or vice versa?

The results of the experiment showed the ambiguity of the perception of shades by different people. Scientists presented this image to participants who did not suffer from color blindness (1000 people took part in the survey) and asked them to answer the question "what color is this rectangle?" For 32% of respondents this color is blue, for 64% - green, and 4% could not decide. Here is how the scientists themselves explain such a range of opinions:

Each person is unique, and many different factors can influence the perception of color shade. The light beam enters the eyeball and reaches the retina, the light-sensitive tissue that lines the fundus of the eyeball. Further, the process of interpretation takes place, when light is transformed into an electrical signal, which is transmitted along the optic nerve to the cortex, the part of the brain responsible for processing the received information. How exactly the brain interprets a color shade can be influenced not only by physiological characteristics, but also by the psychoemotional state of a person. In particular, people experiencing stress are less sensitive to shades of green, and among them there are many more who called this shade of color blue.

Still, green or blue?

Green. From a technical point of view, the model of this color is described as RGB 0.122.116 (green tones - 122, cyan - 116, red - zero). After the participants in the experiment named the color, the scientists placed two more images, expressed in green and expressed in blue, on both sides of the picture, and then again asked to answer the question "what color is this rectangle?" With clear color references, 97% of the participants in the experiment named the original rectangle green.

Well, if you still saw this color as blue, then think about it - maybe it's just time for you to take a vacation!