Not Colorchallenge: The True Color of Strawberries

Look at the photo below. This is the photo of a delicious and delicate cake with fresh strawberries. Unfortunately, I don't have a recipe, but have one question: what color of strawberries do you see?

watch carefully about a minute image source

You can answer in the comments, and it is possible that STEEMIT community will split into two camps, as the whole Internet two years ago with that stupid black-blue or white-gold dress. But, I think that most users see red strawberry.

Now let's make clear. This picture was published by a Japanese Professor of psychology Akiyoshi Kitaoka (already feel dirty trick, huh?). And he did it not olny for Instagram. We are victims of the experiment that demonstrates one of the options for adapting our brain, or maybe its bug. I'm sure this fact did not stop the professor from eating a cake...

Actually, there is no red pixels on this photo, none. One of the superpowers of our brain is Color Constancy. Without this feature, our life would be hell.

Just imagine: we see a green apple green only in the daytime, at dusk it becomes pink, and purple at night. Without such compensation of light and color, we would have died out long ago.

Our eyes respond to three primary colors: blue, green and red. The brain perceives other colors as a combination of the three primary colors. But when there is dissonance the brain in the first place refers to memory and familiar images.

The main trick of this photo- blue background. Initially you see the strawberries, which has a bluish tint. Your brain understands that it's wrong, abnormal, as a result the brain literally excludes the blue color from perception. Erases the blue color of each pixel in the area of strawberries.

And then on the field comes the magic of chromatic contrast: gray on blue or green background becomes red. Neighboring colors affect on each other and because of this sometimes perceived by our eyes in a distorted result.

Here is a vivid example of chromatic contrast: two tablets on different background have different colors (blue and red). In fact, they both have the same shade of gray. image source.

Users of social networks have thoroughly studied Kitaoka’s photo, and convinced of the complete absence of red pixels.

image source.

This fact hardly fits in the head, it starts to hurt. In fact, we create the surrounding reality relying primarily on association and memory, and then at the facts. This is direct evidence of the limitations of our perception at a subconscious level, or, on the contrary, the indicator of its evolution. Such features of thinking allow us to survive in this scary and complicated world.

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sources:
Chromatic Contrast, Twitter akiyoshikitaoka, Color constancy, BBC, NatGeo, images from Google Search.

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