ZADAN ~ Mind

An Optical Illusion

Squares A and B are the same color.

Are these squares really the same color? Look at the image. Look at the "consistency" in color between the 'darker' squares.

Are they really the same?

Yep.

What color is your favorite shirt? Your shirt does not have a color: the color you see is a matter of perception, light reflects off if the shirt and bounces back to your eye, and the way this impression registers in your brain is an abstract grouping we call color.

So, your shirt is a different color depending on the lighting. At 3am, with the lights off, your favorite red T-Shirt is black. At 6am, when your alarm is going off, and the curtains are still closed it's dark red. But when your outside walking across a parking lot to get back to the office, it's bright red.

Imagine if your brain thought of colors as exact shades? You'd never recognize anything. Even just the folds and shadows on your shirt would make it's color unidentifiable.

Color is an impression, not an absolute shade.

So, ask yourself where in the real world you've ever seen that image, a chessboard. Realize that when you see that real chessboard, every square is a different color. Your brain is smart enough to realize that the squares are the functionally same color, and this "optical illusion" image is not a natural phenomenon, 2 dimensional shaded digital 'drawings' don't typically occur in "nature".

But it's an interesting image, lets look at it some more.

What if we zoom in enough to just see the squares and the shadow, and not the green piece?

It looks a bit odd now, and it does some funny things. If you look at "A" or "B" they still look different... But if you look at the darker square above "B". Some times it almost looks like A and B come together.

What if we blacked out all the squares except those two?

Now the brain knows that they are the same color.

How little shading is needed?

Now you can get it to look different, or readjust your eyes and have it look the same. Look around at different points, and see what happens.

Your brain knows what it's doing. The problem isn't that there are errors in what we are perceiving, the problem is that we don't leave it alone and let it see things on it's own. Why try to trap it by ideas or funny little games, we think we need to force it, and train it to act like a precision machine. Maybe a machine can tell you that "A" and "B" are different, but we haven't yet built a machine or come up with equations smart enough to realize that in the real world, these different shades are actually the same color.

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