The reason we tend to agree that lemons are yellow (and lemons) is because all our brains pretty much create the same figment of the imagination when light hits lemons and then bounces into our heads. In consciousness, yellow is a figment of the imagination. The color, though, exists only in the mind. Because most natural light is red, green, and blue combined, a lemon absorbs the blue wavelengths, leaving behind the red and green to hit our retinas, which the brain then combines into the subjective experience of seeing a yellow lemon. Whatever is left behind goes through a hole in our heads called the pupil and strikes the retinas at the back of the eyes, where it all gets translated into the electrochemical buzz of neurons that the brain then uses to construct the subjective experience of seeing colors. When that light collides with, say, a lemon, the lemon absorbs some of those wavelengths and the rest bounce off. ![]() These wavelengths of energy emanate from some source, like the sun, a lamp, a candle. The spectrum of light we can see-the primary colors we call red, green, and blue-are specific wavelengths of electromagnetic energy, Pascal explains. If they do disagree, it’s usually over ideas, not the raw truth of their perceptions. People who grow up in similar environments around similar people tend to have similar brains and thus similar virtual realities. If you didn’t know this, for many the Dress demanded you either take to your keyboard to shout into the abyss or take a seat and ponder your place in the grand scheme of things.īefore the Dress, it was well understood in neuroscience that all reality is virtual therefore consensus realities are mostly the result of geography. We each live in a virtual landscape of perpetual imagination and self-generated illusion, a hallucination informed over our lifetimes by our senses and thoughts about them, updated continuously as we bring in new experiences via those senses and think new thoughts about what we have sensed. The world, as you experience it, is a simulation running inside your skull, a waking dream. The hashtag #TheDress appeared in 11,000 tweets per minute, and the definitive article about the meme, published on WIRED’s website, received 32.8 million unique views within the first few days.įor many, the Dress was an introduction to something neuroscience has understood for a long while: the fact that reality itself, as we experience it, isn’t a perfect one-to-one account of the world around us. When the Dress started circling the internet, a tangible sense of dread about the nature of what is and is not real went as viral as the image itself.Īt times, so many people were sharing this perceptual conundrum, and arguing about it, that Twitter couldn’t load on their devices. The people who saw a different dress seemed clearly, obviously mistaken and quite possibly deranged. But since social media is social, learning the fact that millions saw a different dress than you did created a widespread, visceral response. ![]() ![]() If not for the social aspect of social media, you might have never known that some people did see it differently. Whatever people saw, it was impossible to see it differently. For others, the dress appeared white and gold. For some, when they looked at the photo, they saw a dress that appeared black and blue. The Dress was a meme, a viral photo that appeared all across social media for a few months. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |