What Color is Your Benham's Top?

[BenitoChavez]

Its like the rectangle/square relationship.

An illusion can be color, but a color doesn't necessarily mean its an illusion. Its just in the case of the Bernham Top it is.

 

[Narz]

Funny, I looked again & now it seems more yellowish tan than redish tan. Could be my monitor settings (I have flux also & last time I looked at it was nighttime)

 

[El_Machinae]

Funny thing is that this time, nobody can tell you what is "real color" of the thing you see. Because real color is an illusion . Strange.

Color isn't really an illusion. It's a percept. A color tells you real information (the EM spectrum that you're seeing), it's information that I cannot receive.

 

[red_elk]

I meant, in this particular case, the "real color" is an artifact of perception. In usual case, you can use some device (spectrum analyzer or something), to find real color, but in this case it will be just black and white.

BTW, even ordinary people (who are not color blind) ability to analyze EM spectrum using naked eye is quite limited. We cannot distinguish, for example, yellow and mixture of green and red:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3unPcJDbCc

 

[shadowplay]

On my laptop I saw tan and indigo, and on my Surface tablet I see tan and dark green.

 

[El_Machinae]

I meant, in this particular case, the "real color" is an artifact of perception. In usual case, you can use some device (spectrum analyzer or something), to find real color, but in this case it will be just black and white.

Right! Yes! I see, you're correct. Yeah, I'm enjoying this illusion. There are many visual illusions out there. My favorite is probably the shadow over the checkerboard. Below, squares 'A' and 'B' are actually the same shade of grey.

Spoiler :

 

[Tahuti]

Right! Yes! I see, you're correct. Yeah, I'm enjoying this illusion. There are many visual illusions out there. My favorite is probably the shadow over the checkerboard. Below, squares 'A' and 'B' are actually the same shade of grey.

Spoiler :

The more thought I give about it, the more easily understandable it becomes.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I didn't see any colours.

For example, some melted chocolates (to me) are the same color as blood.

I don't know about other black and white films, but in Psycho chocolate was used as a stand in for blood.

 

[El_Machinae]

Hot damn. Thanks for telling me that. I've told my own personal 'blood/chocolate' stories many times, but I didn't know I had an outside reference.

 

[red_elk]

Just checked again... see different tints of brown all over the figure, not just two circles of tan as before. Another time of day, may be different lighting conditions?

 

[Formaldehyde]

It's a gif. Which colors you perceive will be based on how fast it is running on your own PC at any given time. This is one reason why the youtube video is better.

 

[Borachio]

Yeah. Some kind of tan colour.


Link to video.

 

[Quintillus]

I see blue, green, red, and yellow. I'd never heard of ecru before, but what I termed as yellow is not that far off from the ecru on Wikipedia's page. The color at the top of the circle is blue, though.

Disclaimer: Like Narz, I have flux on and it's night. So it may be different at day.

The interesting thing is that if I printscreen it, it's all black-and-white. A nice illusion.

Edit: Lol, Formaldehyde is right. I was viewing it in Opera 11 initially. After seeing his post, I tried it in IE8. IE8 is so slow that you can actually see it spinning as the GIF animates. There, it's clearly black-and-white, as it spins at 1-2 rotations per second. So yes, how fast your computer is and what browser it's running will have a potentially-quite-major impact on what you see.

 

[salty mud]

Brown and blue. Very interesting illusion, might try it out on the family.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

My favorite is probably the shadow over the checkerboard. Below, squares 'A' and 'B' are actually the same shade of grey.

Spoiler :

Agreed. Most illusion can be broken by being aware and concentrated. But this one is absolutely impenetrable to me. When I first encountered it I actually opened it in a picture editing program to check it really was the same color.

 

[Bootstoots]

I once had a RL top that was a Benham's top. I remember seeing a variety of colors, dark yellowish tan being only one of them. This is one of those illusions that is best seen IRL.