I'm absolutely and totally unable to see anything but white and gold under shade. I've tried to hide the left bright spot, then the right bright spot, then scrolling up and down, then concentrating on the white and picturing it blue.
Nah, it's still exactly as white and gold as before. I know it's a brain trick but I just can't wrap my mind around the idea that it's possible to twist BLACK to GOLD and BLUE to WHITE, whatever the lighting.
My head hurts.
Yeah, this is
exactly what happens to me. Even when I see the photos where people have darkened it to the point where the dress is literally blue and black, my brain still just thinks "oh that's that white and gold dress from earlier". I can't see it any other way, no matter what I do!
That's different to the spinning dancer gif, because with that one, I could look at a different place and it would spin the other way. With this one, I have literally no control over it, and nothing I do seems to change that.
The trick here is even more baffling : the blue squares on top of the left cube are of the same color than the yellow squares of the right cube.
(thanks to Smalltalk for this one)
Okay, I've seen the chessboard one, but this one can F right off!!
Totally mindblowing!!!
I was sceptical too, but if you open the image into Paint and shift things about, they really are the same colours. I mean, I'm still not sure where people are getting a blue illumination from, but it does demonstrate the mechanics of it.
Perception is so weird.
I am speculating that it is some sort of default filter: we tend to encounter desaturated colors because of underexposure in bad lighting conditions at night. In that case the remaining illumination is bluish, so the brain has learned to compensating for that by shifting to red and green, so bluish becomes white. Here, the desaturation is because of overexposure, but because the brain is not used to overexposure it has no filter for that and defaults to the underexposure filter. Once it has made up its mind, the subconscious is happy to ignore the evidence to the contrary, like the fact that the image is overexposed.
This might fit in with the age-relatedness: People who are older might have trouble closing their pupils when exposed to too much light and might be used to overexposure situations. That means the brain has the correct filter available and uses the evidence to use the more correct one (assuming that there really is no blue illumination here. If you intentionally messed with the lighting conditions, you could probably get the same thing with a real white-and-gold dress).
Well, for me, it's because it looks like the light-source is from behind the dress, and therefore the front of the dress (i.e. the side we're seeing in the photo) is in a very deep shadow. Thus, my brain is compensating for the fact that it's in a shadow, and turning everything lighter, hence seeing it as white and gold.
I presume that your brain is seeing the light at the top and assuming (correctly) that the light is ambient/non-directional/hitting the front of the dress just as brightly as it's hitting whatever is in the background. Your brain therefore sees the dress as being overexposed in very bright light, and thus turns everything darker, hence seeing it as blue and black.
I assume that it's a flash in the mirror that we're seeing in the background, and therefore the light is indeed coming from the front of the dress, rather than the back, and thus greatly overexposing the dress, instead of causing the dress to be in a deep shadow.
