The Effect of Uncertainty on the Brain

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The dress turned out to be a new category of visual illusion unlike a rabbit that can look like a duck. Pascal and his team had a hunch that this had to do with what happens when the brain faces substantial uncertainty. When the brain must disambiguate an ambiguous image it does so using its priors priors for years of experience, regularity leading up to the present. The red is a complete fabrication by your brain which is in a way a lie told to you by your visual system.

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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