Your Eyes Cheat Your Brain
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 in buzz
No matter how strongly you want to believe you are seeing blue and green spirals here, there is no blue color in this image. There is only green, red and orange. What you think is blue is actually green. You can check this through Photoshop or by zooming, if you need an affirmation. Your eyes cheat you.
Discovered on Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s site
This post has 21 comments
June 22nd, 2009
Except for those of us who are red-green color-blind… then it just looks gray.
June 28th, 2009
I’m red-green color-blind and I don’t see it as gray. But I do see the red as more of a pink color (including what I thought people thought was the blue color) and I can see the green pretty clearly although it is darker than the one in the green spiral.
June 24th, 2009
It’s such a good illusion I didn’t believe it until I copied it into paint, used the color picker on a “blue” spot and spray-painted it into a “green” spot… and nothing happened!
June 25th, 2009
I would think it’s more accurate to say our brains are cheating our eyes! Isn’t this caused by our brains’ interpretation of the color? Or it is a mechanism in the eye that causes the illusion?
June 27th, 2009
The illusion is generated in the visual cortex, due to what color it’s alternated with (orange or magenta). I opened it with Paint and verified that what appears blue is actually green. The closer to the center of the spiral you look, the bluer the green looks (from cyan to blue basically). However what appears green stays fairly constant in appearance. The illusion is created in the part of the visual cortex that processes color. The cones in the eyes are what actually detects color through a process of triangulation based on the frequency of light being reflected from what you are looking at (3 types of cones: red, green, blue).
July 30th, 2009
The trichromatic theory of color vision is one of 2. The dichromatic theory posits red-green, and blue-yellow receptors.
June 25th, 2009
Lies, lies, lies!!!
June 25th, 2009
AndyMo: our eyes are not passive receptors; the initial stages of image processing such as color opponency split and contrast detection happens right in the retina. I’d say the eyes themselves have more than a little responsibility for this illusion.
June 25th, 2009
Take a piece of paper and make a tiny hole so you can just see one color only at a time through it, you can prove to yourself they are really the same color ^^
June 27th, 2009
Please give proper credit to Akiyoshi Kitaoka for his work.
June 27th, 2009
The bluer ones are OUTLINED in blue — that significantly affects what we see.
June 27th, 2009
Er, they’re not.
June 27th, 2009
It appears that way in this post because the image is being resized by the browser. Click on the image to see it in its original form, and you’ll see that there are no outlines.
June 27th, 2009
thats fuckin burnt
June 27th, 2009
It’s only because the “green” and “blue”, at least one of them, are outlined in different colors – look closely.
June 27th, 2009
I don’t know what browser you are using but there is no “outlining” in mine.
This is an optical illusion. Get over it.
June 27th, 2009
there is no outlining, load it into photoshop and zoom in.
June 28th, 2009
I printed this image and the illusion still holds. But when I cut a “green” and “blue” section out and compared them side by side, they appear the same color. However, that same color is different than either the “green” or “blue” within the image. It is a darker green and a lighter blue. But again, when I take the cutout strip and place it next to the color in the image, it will match both the “green” and the “blue” whichever it is placed next to. Thanks for a great demonstration. (If our eye-brain interface can be fooled like this, it is no wonder how our ear-brain interface can be fooled by polictians.)
July 7th, 2009
If you zoom in using an image editor, you can quite clearly see the colours are the same. Very weird!
July 22nd, 2009
BAsta con poner los dedos en la pantalla y ver los trazos por separado.
January 10th, 2010
It is enough with putting the fingers in the screen and seeing the outlines separately.
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