AN optical illusion has gone viral after tricking many into believing they’re seeing a color that isn’t there.
Most optical illusions out there use color to confuse the human brain.
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And one Japanese psychologist is proving that after creating a mind-bending color illusion.
Akiyoshi Kitaoka from Ritsumeikan University in Japan recently shared a tweet of an image of a strawberry tart that has left many confused.
For the illusion, the psychologist switched out the strawberry’s red pixels for grey ones.
Still, despite the lack of red pixels in the image, many Twitter users insisted that there were.
Shortly after, arguments began to brew under the Twitter thread, with many arguing in favor of the colors they think they saw.
“There are definitely red pixels,” one user commented.
“It’s a warm grey,” another argued in response.
However, Kitaoka cleared up the debate, tweeting: “Strawberries appear to be reddish, though all the pixels are cyan or gray.”
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How does this work?
The reason most color optical illusions work may be due to our brain filling in images based on our memory of what the color should be, according to one study.
“Our brains do a pretty good job of keeping colors constant for us,” Pete Etchells wrote for The Guardian.
“When we look at a banana, for instance, it will look yellow regardless of the conditions we’re viewing it in,” he added.
This is known as ‘cortical coloring-in’ and happens via the visual cortex, which is found in the occipital lobe of our brain.
Another phenomenon behind optical illusions that utilize color is called color constancy.
“This occurs because our brain figures out the color of things from discounting the color of the light source,” Juno Kim from the University of New South Wales told ScienceAlert.
And in the case of the strawberries, “our brain computes all of this information to account for lighting and essentially sees red,” Kim said.
“This phenomenon provides us with the ability to see colors almost invariable across changes in lighting conditions, such as outdoors versus indoors.”
