These strawberries are NOT red (apparently). It’s the latest colour mind-bender to go viral
Everyone’s being driven bananas by this picture of a plate of strawberries.
They might look red, but Japanese experimental psychologist @AkiyoshiKitaoka says the photo contains NO red pixels – they are actually grey with a hint of green.
A bit like that dress meme from a couple of years back, it’s an example of your brain trying to rationalise an image seen under a strange light. No, we’re not sure either.
This picture has NO red pixels. Great demo of color constancy (ht Akiyoshi Kitaoka) pic.twitter.com/pZHvbB6QHE
— Matt Lieberman (@social_brains) February 27, 2017
Still not convinced? Maybe this will help.
@social_brains I isolated a few of the colors that appear most “red” in the strawberries and put them on the white background to the right. pic.twitter.com/GJJ9PJqNxt
— Carson Mell (@carsonmell) February 28, 2017
Or this?
@carsonmell @social_brains I drew three rectangles on top to also show the effect. pic.twitter.com/PaSxflmGJv
— Tim Hutton (@_tim_hutton_) February 28, 2017
Some people were still not convinced.
@AkiyoshiKitaoka It’s a warm grey … the pixels *do* have value in their red channel. If there were no red, it would look like this… pic.twitter.com/6Z7IE5fuDW
— (@AllegroDigital) March 1, 2017
Sounds like we need to hear from an expert. They’re bound to clear it up, right? Here’s what Bevil Conway, a visual perception expert, told Motherboard.
“If you imagine walking around outside under a blue sky, that blueness is, in some sense, colour-contaminating everything you see. If you take a red apple outside under a blue sky, there are more blue wavelengths entering your eye.
“If you take the apple inside under a fluorescent or incandescent light without that same bias, the pigments in the apple are exactly the same but because the spectral content of the light source is different, the spectrum entering your eye that’s reflected off the object is different.”
This just happened to our brain.
“Ascending dragon”: The spiral appears to contract. pic.twitter.com/9Bs1yCqSM2
— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) March 1, 2017