The Mystery of the Dress

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Pascal had a hunch that the photo of the dress was missing a lot of color information which made it a rare perfectly ambiguous color image. experiences that you had leading up to the present are called your priors and we use our priors to predict the future. Pascal thought what must be happening was as with color constancy the brain was lying to people in an effort to give them something more useful than the truth. Unlike with constancy for this image it was telling different lies for different people two different sets of lies dividing us into two camps with incompatible personal realities white and gold black and blue.

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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