The internet is an informative, yet puzzling place. Every now and again, we are foxed by optical illusions where one thing looks like quite another. It can also be a word that sounds like different words to different people or a piece of clothing that different people see as being of two completely different colours. The latest phenomenon sending social media into a tizzy is a photograph – a black & white picture that looks like a colour picture.
It looks like a colour picture but it isn’t. This is a monochrome picture. Only the grid of lines superimposed over it are coloured. This is our brain filling in the missing information to compensate for the incomplete information we get.
If you have reading glasses remove them. If you don’t, narrow your eyes in a way that make the picture appear blurry or out of focus. This strengthens the perception of that this black and white image is coloured.
This Twitter user offered people a link to try it out in MatLab (Application development, including Graphical User Interface building) if they wanted.
As this commentator worked out, the grid pattern means that only about a third of the picture is coloured.
This Twitter user helpfully posted the picture without the coloured pattern. This gives us an idea of what a difference those coloured lines make to what we see and how we see it.
The tweeple were confused by this strange phenomenon. They could see that the picture was not a colour image and thought it was really weird that it looked coloured.
One commentator said it was “messing with my brain”. The image did freak out a lot of people.
Some were not to impressed. Ho hum, they seemed to say.
This zoomed in image indicates that the image has a lot of colour bleed, which is why it seems coloured in spite of being monochrome
This black & white-or-colour picture illusion is remarkable for precisely the reason that this commentator says: it is the mind filling in the gaps that reality leaves out. I seem to recall a term called ‘perceptual closure’ from psychology class in college that seems to explain how the brain tries to view incomplete objects/ patterns as complete or whole. Just because we understand the phenomenon doesn’t make it any less amazing though; this doesn’t make the human brain any less incredible!
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