Remember The Dress?

Do you guys remember The Dress? The one that was either white and gold or blue and brown or whatever and whatever and the whole internet lost their minds because everyone was looking at the exact same picture but it seemed impossible to get everyone on the same page about what they were seeing?

I had to know the science behind it, because it was driving me up the wall, and when I looked into it I learned that the differences in the ways people perceived the color of the dress had a lot to do with...assumptions. Which I was not expecting.

A neuroscientist named Bevil Conway (what a great name, Bevil) believes that the phenomenon had to do with assumptions the brain made about the lighting of the dress. People who thought the dress was white and gold subconsciously assumed it was lit by daylight in the picture, so their brains ignored shorter, bluer wavelengths. People who saw it as blue and black thought it was lit by artificial, warm light, and their brains ignored longer, redder wavelengths. If you saw it as blue and brown, your brain probably assumed neutral lighting. And to make it even more interesting, older people and women were more likely to see the dress as white and gold, and the researchers speculated that this could've had to do with the fact that older people and women were more likely to be active during the day and spend more time in natural lighting(!).

I've been thinking about that dress this week. That dress, ultimately, helped me understand color better—because it kind of dismantled my idea of color as a thing that was universally experienced in one certain way that almost everyone could agree on. It also helped me understand people better. It made me realize how much of our 'objective reality' is not objective at all, but based in perception and assumptions. That our brains are literally designed to work that way. They're designed, for the sake of survival, to map the things about reality that will keep us alive—they make assumptions, fill in blanks, and actually *disregard* a lot of information. They are both adding and subtracting, all the time.

Take peripheral vision. Your peripheral vision is really bad for seeing color accurately—unless you already know what the thing in your periphery is. For example, there's a blue book sitting on the table beside me right now. I can see it out of the corner of my eye, and I can see that it's blue. But I BET if I take a pack of Phase 10 cards, shuffle it up, draw one randomly (yes, I'm doing this right now) and hold it about where the book is, my brain can't tell what color of card I've drawn. Yup. The card looks black, while the book still looks blue. That's because my brain knows the book is blue and it's filling in the blanks for me, making an assumption while framing it as perceivable reality, but it doesn't know what color the card is so it's just phoning it in there. I wonder—if you held a blue banana in my periphery, would my brain tell me it was yellow because it knows bananas should be yellow? I wish I had a blue banana on hand to test this...

Anyway, if I understand this correctly, the color that I perceive in the room at the edges of my field of vision is not my eye measuring wavelengths; it's my brain making assumptions based on memory and what color it thinks things should be and telling me that I'm seeing the colors beside me just as well as the ones in front of my face. And because I 'see' it, it is VERY HARD to believe that it's not objective reality. I have read the articles and mostly understand what's going on here, I think...but I still see this blue book out of the corner of my eye even though science tells me that my eyes can't measure those wavelengths at that angle. 

I was listening to a podcast this morning (one that was recorded in 2015 and has nothing to do with this current moment in time) and a scientist on there was talking about massive social movements that polarize people—I can't remember; he may have been talking about BLM—and the science behind why someone can deliver a passionate speech and half of the crowd can feel moved and convicted and inspired to action, and the other half can feel even more set in their ways, offended, and upset. I'm just going to quote him (his name is Mike McHargue and I can't paraphrase him because he just always words things so perfectly):

"Because it's essential to human cognition that human beings self-identify basically as good people, they unconsciously filter any information that undermines their self-identification as a good person. So, if you're inside a power structure...and someone raises evidence that your way of life oppresses another people group, not only is it likely to make you defensive in one case; it's actually more likely [to make] you tune out and forget [that evidence] later." 

Brains disregard facts, on purpose, without us knowing. That is a fact. And it's weird and unsettling. 

If you're Canadian, you probably know where I'm going with this. We have a thing going on up here where we're all looking at a different kind of The Dress and we just cannot get on the same page. I've been having conversations that go in circles with people who are seeing the same videos and reading the same articles as I have but we can't agree on what's right and wrong in them. Last night I watched the emergency debate about the protests going on in our capital and after a while it felt as fruitless as arguing about color. Each MP stood and defended their perception of the situation, passionately and certainly, only to be challenged by another. They used phrases like, "I have spoken to my constituents personally, and they have said..." or, "I have seen this myself, with my own eyes..." And maybe none of them, or us, or anyone, is conscious of the fact that our brains are actively filtering, amplifying, and disregarding—just the way they've been designed to. That we can't actually trust our own eyes. Our eyes were designed to have blind spots, and that's why we need...ears. And other people to listen to. (There's a rabbit trail to be had here about how people have developed a massive distrust of experts over these past couple of years, and how this makes this whole mess even more convoluted. I don't even know what to do about this! I do trust experts—medical professionals, especially, right now—and I know that this has drastically affected the way that I see this 'dress.' I don't know what to do with that except acknowledge it as one particular facet of this discussion.)

Another interesting thing about that dress, though: A group of researchers in Germany showed it to a group of people and had them adjust the color of a disc on a screen so it matched the dress. This group, rather than describing the dress as white or blue, reported seeing a spectrum of shades. I wonder if this is because they realized, when forced to look closely, that they couldn't rely completely on a glance, a first impression. 

Which makes me wonder: what if we started looking at this current situation from a place of understanding our limitations as humans to see objective reality? What if we knew going in that our brains are going to filter things to get rid of stuff that makes us feel badly about ourselves, and fill in blanks based on assumptions we have and hold maybe a bit too closely? If we learned to rely on other people to help us see what's going on in our blind spots instead of insisting that we already can do that on our own? 

I have my opinions about what's going down right now. I think that there are things we can objectively point to as true, false, good, bad, etc., and I'm still open to having these conversations because I think they're important. But I also think it's important that as we talk we, you know, remember the dress.