These are images from chapter three of How Minds Change.

You can click them to open a slideshow.

Excerpts from How Minds Change to go along with these images:

“The Dress was a meme, a viral photo that appeared all across social media for a few months. For some, when they looked at this photo, they saw a dress that appeared black and blue. For others, the dress appeared white and gold. Whatever people saw, it was impossible to see it differ- ently. If not for the social aspect of social media, you might have never known that some people did see it differently. But since social media is social, learning the fact that millions saw a different dress than you did created a widespread, visceral response. The people who saw a different The Dress seemed clearly, obviously mistaken and quite possibly de- ranged. When The Dress started circling the internet, a tangible sense of dread about the nature of what is and is not real went as viral as the image itself.”

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“There’s a great example of [color constancy] in an illusion created by vision researcher Akiyoshi Kitaoka. It looks like a bowl of red strawberries, but the image contains zero red pixels. When you look at the photo, no red light enters your eye. Instead, the brain assumes the image is overexposed by blue light. It turns down the contrast a bit and adds a little color where it was just removed, which means the red you experience when you look at those strawberries isn’t coming from the image. If you’ve grown up eating straw- berries and spent a lifetime seeing strawberries as red, when you see the familiar shape of a strawberry, your brain assumes they should be red. The red you see in Kitaoka’s illusion is generated internally, an assump- tion made after the fact and without your knowledge, a lie told to you by your visual system to provide you with what ought to be the truth.”

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“This was the idea: if they got some pink Crocs and paired them with white socks, then illuminated both with green light, the Crocs would appear gray, like they had in the grow house; but the socks would reflect the green light back and appear green. If you thought the socks had been dyed green, you would surmise nothing was amiss with the light- ing and accept the image without editing it. However, if you expected the socks to be white and saw them as such, your brain, without your knowledge, would then edit the image by subtracting the green-tinted overexposure while adding back the pink hues to the shoes. If Karlovich and Pascal were right, depending on what people unconsciously as- sumed, they would disagree on what they saw.”