The dress that divided the Internet into two opposing camps

Saturday 28 February 2015

So what do you see? Blue and Black or White and Gold?

I really don't think any dress has caused so much Internet frenzy in recent times like this one.

For over 24-hours people across social media have been arguing about whether a picture depicts a perfectly nice dress as blue with black lace fringe or white with gold lace fringe.

Infact, I saw white with gold about an hour ago after waking up from a short nap, then now I see blue with black

It's really confusing, some people even think it's scary...

This fight is about more than just social media—it’s about primal biology and the way human eyes and brains have evolved to see color in a sunlit world.

Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors.

The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you’re looking at.

Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the “real” color of the object. “Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance,” says Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. “But I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.” (Neitz sees white-and-gold.)

Even celebrities weighed in on the fashion debate, with Kim Kardashian asking her 29.4million Twitter followers to help settle a disagreement between herself and husband Kanye West.'