AN optical illusion went viral after it tricked many into thinking they were seeing a color that wasn’t there.
Most optical illusions use color to confuse the human brain.
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The optical illusion went viral after it tricked many into thinking they were seeing a color that wasn’t there. Credit: twitter/Akiyoshi Kitaoka
And a Japanese psychologist proves it after creating a stunning color illusion.
Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University in Japan recently shared twitter strawberry shortcake photos that confused many.
For the illusion, the psychologist replaced the red pixels on the strawberry with gray pixels.
However, despite the lack of red pixels in the image, many Twitter users insisted that they did exist.
Soon after, discussions began to erupt on Twitter, with many arguing in favor of the colors they thought they were seeing.
“There are definitely red pixels,” one user commented.
“It’s a warm grey,” said another in response.
However, Kitaoka clarified the debate, tweeting: “Strawberries appear to be reddish, though all pixels are cyan or gray.”
How does this work?
The reason most color optical illusions work may be because our brain fills in the images based on our memory of what the color should be, according to a study.
“Our brains do a good job of keeping colors constant for us,” Pete Etchells wrote for The Guardian.
“When we look at a banana, for example, it will look yellow regardless of the conditions in which we look at it,” he added.
This is known as ‘cortical staining’ and it occurs via the visual cortex, located in the occipital lobe of our brain.
Another phenomenon behind optical illusions that use color is called color constancy.
“This happens because our brain detects the color of things by ignoring the color of the light source,” Juno Kim, from the University of New South Wales, told ScienceAlert.
And in the case of strawberries, “our brain calculates all of that information to explain the lighting and essentially sees red,” Kim said.
“This phenomenon gives us the ability to see colors nearly unchanged through changes in lighting conditions, such as outdoors versus indoors.”
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education