The Color of the Crocs

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Michael knew that this was impossible. They went into the sunlight and he saw oh no wait these crocs are pink under the green lights they were gray under sunlight they were pink. He understood it he was studying color science it made sense. The brain then decodes that buzzing to construct the subjective experience of color along this electromagnetic spectrum radio waves are very very long and x-rays are really really short we can't see those because we evolved to detect the strongest wavelengths produced by the sun or what we would call visible light shorter wavelengths of visible light are experienced in the brain as the color of blue longer wavelengths as the color red and green in the middle.

When facing a novel and uncertain situation, the brain secretly disambiguates the ambiguous without letting you know it was ever uncertain in the first place, leading people who disambiguate differently to seem iNsAnE.

This episode is about why we so often don't understand why we disagree, which leads us to disagree even more, and we explore that through the science behind The Dress. We look into why some people see it as black and blue, others see it as white and gold, and how the scientific investigation of why that is led to the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs, and how the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs may be, as one researcher explains, the nuclear bomb of cognitive neuroscience.

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