Name: Why Your Brain Thinks These Strawberries Are Red | Science Of Illusions | WIRED
Uploaded: 2021-11-04T03:20:26.000Z
Duration: 13 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What color are the strawberries in this photograph?

If you don't believe me, we look for one of the reddest

looking patches on this image, cut it out.

This illusion was created by a Japanese researcher

and it hinges on something called color constancy.

It's an incredible visual phenomenon by which the color

of an object appears to stay more or less the same

or the lighting conditions under which your brain

we're gonna be looking at a whole bunch of visual illusions

that mess with the way you perceive color.

Can you tell which of the squares on the left

is the same color as a square on the right?

To help us out, we called up David Eagleman.

You might remember him from our previous episode.

We invited him to WIRED's offices in San Francisco

to spend the day running some experiments.

irrespective of what the lighting condition is.

- [Host] Light has a lot to do with how you perceive color,

in large part because light itself can be color.

Tungsten light, named for the filament inside

And the color of daylight can vary dramatically

to vibrant reds and yellows and oranges at sunset.

And now inside with totally different lighting conditions,

even though what's actually hitting your eyes is different

what exactly hits you is very different in these cases.

This would look white to you if we were under tungsten

To find out, we worked with an artist named Reina Takahashi

It's this very, very bright, clear, kind of white color.

So what happens if we move these into the lights?

what's called the illuminate is quite different on them.

- Now there's something interesting going on here.

You can rationally recognize that these objects

are different colors, but your brain still classifies

You might've noticed it has a kind of blue-green

Researchers think that your visual system

perceives that overlay as the color of the light

And it corrects for that light by subtracting it

from the actual physical gray color of the pixels

This causes you to perceive the berries as red.

We have some filters here that like the overlay

which is opposite red on the color spectrum.

And that means if you use these filters to cover up

our camera lens, it actually blocks red light.

So if we now point our camera at these red objects,

the pixels on your computer screen are technically gray.

But to you, these objects probably still look red.