The Dress and the Epistemic Crisis

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In February of 2015 Cecilia Bleesdale was preparing for her daughter Grace's wedding she took a photo of a $77 dress at a London shopping mall thinking she might wear that dress to the wedding. A Scottish musician named Caitlin McNeil posted a picture of the dress on tumblr and captioned it with guys please help me is this dress white and gold or blue and black me and my friends cannot agree and we are freaking the fuck out on tumblr people sort of argue over what they see. The image spread like an existential crisis virus began spreading but maybe not because it could have stopped right there if it hadn't been for a Scottish musician named Caitlin McNeil

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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