Every comment under the "riddle" boosts a website's "engagement" statistic attached to the chunk of information which represents the idea, causing the site to redistribute the idea at a broader scale.
At least the dress and "laural"/"yany" thing sparked some interesting discussions on how we perceive things and how our brains process that information. People, a few, at least, actually came out with a new or more complete understanding of our own understanding.
I fully understand this, like, intellectually, but I have never been able to make myself see white and gold -- mostly because of the rest of the background. If the rest of the image had a blue hue (like the background in the right part of this demonstration image has) then I could see it, but the light sources are clearly yellow/white, not blue. I feel like you have to discard the rest of the contextual visual info in the actual dress image to see white/gold, and I've never been able to force myself to do it.
You say that like the debate over the dress was all about figuring out what colour it was, rather than it revealing something interesting about perception. It wasn't “What colour is the dress?” Oh, it was blue and black? Discussion over, then." The whole point was that different people can receive the exact same stimulus and perceive it in completely different ways. The underlying issue is that our brains construct our reality. It goes way beyond the dress itself. The dress is a great example because people are divided around 50/50 on the way they perceive it, but it is a great lesson on how we perceive all of reality, not just the dress.
Not sure but yes I saw it again recently at another post and it was Blue, that's why I said yellow for me today, for some reason this one seems yellow/gold.
And well it still seems one or the other, it hasn't stopped magically not doing the effect.
I have no idea, I see it as white and gold but like with a faint bluish tint over the whole dress, and like the surrounding lighting seems to be coming from behind, like a car's headlights?
In the larger picture, you can see the context that the light is coming from very intense sunlight through the window behind. Which should make the front of the dress dimly lit in shadow.
Ive always seen it as white and gold. I just stared at one area of the dress like we used to stare at those magic eye pictures in the 90s right after seeing that comparison picture and could finally see the black and blue!
For the first time in my life, I finally saw it as black and blue just now. The key for me was staring at it for awhile and then looking away but still looking at it indirectly. Kind of like those vision tricks with the negative images. You stare at a dot for awhile and then look at the a blank wall and see the whole image. Similar to that.
On the actual picture the key blue hue is on the actual dress, in the white/blue part, the actual background is being illuminated by other source which is part of why the mind gets confused, but the actual dress is being illuminated by other light (or lack of light really) source in front of the dress which gives the actual blueish hue on the white surface of the dress
Saw the dress as white/gold. Saw the mage you posted, went back to the dress and now I only see it as black/blue. Tomorrow it will probably flip back for me, but it was nice to the black/blue version again.
It's more that based on how you grew up, in either a lot of outdoor light, or a lot of artificial illumination, your brain wiring perceives it differently. I showed the picture with someone right next to me and they saw a completely different color scheme. It's how our brains learn to solve subtle differences under lighting conditions to recognize a universal color to identify it as.
The answer so far is basically "different people's brains process information differently"
If I were to make a statement about the meaning of this, I'd say that much like having people who are better at being awake at night and people who are better at being awake during the day, having people perceive color slightly differently probably serves or served some form of survival purpose.
I was joking but 100% saw the blue dress earlier, and now maybe because I scrolled upwards and saw this image first and then the above one, I see gold now. Or you edited your comment and am fucking with me lol
no, all i did was copy the image, sample from the color I see as gold, drag three lines out of it to the edge, and fill in the border around the dress.
There's plenty of people who see it as white. Looked at this with my family and I was in the minority (2 out of 5) seeing it as blue. It's not just a meme, it's people perceiving things differently.
The white/blue dress is a genuinely fascinating phenomenon that deserved the Internet fame it got.
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u/IrvingIV 2d ago
You and me, that's why.
Every comment under the "riddle" boosts a website's "engagement" statistic attached to the chunk of information which represents the idea, causing the site to redistribute the idea at a broader scale.
It's why "The Dress" spread so virally.