How human obsession with color has shaped our modern world

MC: It’s really weird. Ok. We need to take a break and we will be back soon to talk to Adam Rogers about color, which will become very strange.

[Break]

MC: Welcome back, today’s guest is our colleague WIRED senior reporter Adam Rogers.Adam just wrote a recently published book called Full Spectrum: How Color Science Makes Us ModernAdam, as we have been discussing, humans have been obsessed with color since we had Photoshop and Pantone color palettes. But even after so long, we still don’t fully understand all the ways color affects our brains. Since we have you on the show, I think we have an obligation to ask you questions about The Dress.

with: I guess when this happened in 2015, it began to spread on the Internet. I think, ah, another meme, anyway. Then Rob Capps, the executive editor at the time, walked over and sat down where I was sitting. Say: “Did you see this dress?” I thought, “I know it’s ridiculous. Right?” He was like, yes, “I know, I can’t believe it.” I said, “My Meaning, it is obviously blue.” He looked at me, his eyes frozen. His face changed and he said, “It’s white.” I said, “Oh, nonsense.”

With that insight, I realized, oh my goodness, I was four hours late. Like, this is huge. I was four hours late. At that moment, Joe Brown, who was editing the website, ran over, like, no kidding, running, running, walking, like, reaching out to the science desk. And all I did was look up and shout to him, “We are doing it.” I started calling. The reason I started calling is that before I joined WIRED, when I was offering scholarships to science writers at MIT, I spent most of my time obsessed with colors and how people perceive colors and what pigments chemistry, science, and nerves How science works.

So I have a few people who can call and answered my call. That day was a strange day, because everything it coughed up appeared on the screen we all saw. These emitting screens are composed of tiny, tiny light spots, red light, green light, and blue light. Sometimes there is white light behind or beside them. They manage to create not all possible colors that a human can see, of course not in 2015. The color gamut is not so good. But many colors that humans can see are emitted in the form of light, not reflections, not subtractive pigments, but an acceptable surface, showing this picture of what has become a super unusual piece of clothing, which is a A dual-mode color illusion.

So, the illusion is that you look at those in children’s books, like rabbits or ducks, and the cube is forward or backward, those things. We call them bimodal because they have two different forms. People see them in two different ways, but there is usually a bimodal hallucination that makes your brain switch back and forth. The way the eyes and brain perceive shapes and colors are related to each other, and they overlap. They talk to each other, but they are semi-independent systems.

They overlap, but are independent systems. So this is a bimodal illusion that was considered very rare at the time. Many people are already studying color illusions. So you keep seeing them on Twitter, they are really interesting, but they are rare. Once your brain, it seems to have made a choice, which one chose blue or white. You just can’t see the other one, it’s just locked, you can’t understand the person sitting next to you, he’s saying that the place you are going is another color, well, it’s impossible.