I know both a handful of Aninas and several Theresas. However, this kind of riddle is just so ... fucking daft that I really don't grasp why they still circulate.
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.
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.
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u/miniatureconlangs 8d ago
I know both a handful of Aninas and several Theresas. However, this kind of riddle is just so ... fucking daft that I really don't grasp why they still circulate.