The Magic of Color Constancy

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The brain constructs reality which is to say not only are we limited by what the brain interprets from a limited range of senses but also the brain doesn't always give you the raw information from those senses. This is where color constancy comes in color constancy is the tendency for a color of a familiar object to appear the same under any lighting condition. A yellow banana always seems to be yellow even when in objective reality it isn't reflecting as much yellow light as the brain is telling you that it is you are observing the effects of matter on your brain not the matter itself.

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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