HOW MANY colors can you see in the following optical illusion?
You may be surprised to find that there aren’t as many as you initially thought.
1
Each column is actually the same color Credit: LENSTORE
It turns out that there are only five of them and it all comes down to an optical illusion.
Even more shocking is that each column of eyes is the same color.
The illusion is a well-known eye trick, called the Munker-White illusion.
The effect is achieved thanks to the narrow colored lines that cross them, which deceive what you see.
If you zoom in on the image, the illusion fades slightly and you should see more of the true color.
According to Lenstore, which produced the clever image, psychologist Michael White came up with the concept in the 1960s.
It refers to the perceived lightness of the form.
For example, the same two gray rectangles appear to have lighter or darker shades of gray when placed next to white or black objects.
In the 1970s, Hans Munker, another psychologist, noticed that the same effect applied to colored objects.
“The Munker-White illusion works by placing a single-colored object behind grids of different colors, thus affecting how we see them,” Lenstore’s Sujata Paul explained.
“It’s based on changing the stripes in the foreground and it still works even if you change the background color.
“This distorted perception of color is caused by a phenomenon based on the Bezold effect, named after Professor Wilhelm von Bezold, who discovered that a color can appear differently depending on its relationship to neighboring colours.
“While some scientists believe that the illusion occurs during the early stages of visual processing, when light first hits the retina, others believe that the effects occur later in the brain as it processes the data.”
Learn more about science
Do you want to know more about the weird and wonderful world of science? From the moon to the human body, we’ve got you covered…
We pay for your stories! Have a story for The Sun Online science and technology team? Email us at [email protected]
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education