You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. So I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals. In the two squares displayed below, the one on the left is colored using the same color from the blue spiral, and on the right using the green spiral.
Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. So they are mostly green with a solid splash of blue.
The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the "blue" spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the "green" one. Here’s a zoom to make this more clear:
See? The orange stripes go through the "green" spiral but not the "blue" one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color. If you still don’t believe me, concentrate on the edges of the colored spirals. Where the green hits the magenta it looks bluer to me, and where the blue hits the orange it looks greener. Amazing.
The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral , the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily we can be fooled.
This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear.
So the next time someone swears they saw Jesus, or a UFO, or a ghost, show them this picture. What you see in life is absolutely and provably not what you get.
Edit to add: if you like this illusion, then you might want to check out this audio illusion, and this one of a spinning woman’s sillhouette which is one of my all-time favorites.
你看见的是被嵌入的条纹，绿色，橙红色，还有蓝色，对吧？不可思议的是，绿色和蓝色的条纹其实是同一个颜色。一开始，我以为是恶作剧高手Richard又一次在愚弄大家，于是在Photoshop里打开了这张图片，给这两种条纹取了色。下列两个方块中，左边的和蓝色条纹中的颜色一致，右边的则和绿色条纹中的一致。
就像我说的一样，真是不可思议！出于卖弄的习惯，这两个条纹中的RGB颜色分别是0，255，150，是混杂了一点纯蓝的绿色。
它们看上去颜色不同，是因为我们的大脑是依据周围的颜色进行比较再判明色彩的。在这个例子中，条纹并不是如一眼望去那么连续不断的。橙色的条纹并没有穿过“蓝色”的条纹，桃红色的条纹也没有穿过“绿色”的条纹。这里有个看得更清楚的放大版：
看清楚了吧？橙色的条纹穿过了“绿色”的条纹，但没有穿过“蓝色”的。因此，在我们没有意识到的情况下，大脑将条纹和橙色条纹相比较，不得不下了绿色的判断。桃红的条纹让另一道条纹看上去呈蓝色，即使它们根本就是同一个颜色。如果你还是不相信，就集中盯着条纹的边缘看，在我看来，蓝色接触到桃红的地方会显得更绿，真是惊人。
这个图案是条纹的，这是因为我们的大脑面对这种图案会更容易判断错误。即使条纹不是由同一种颜色构成的，但重复的条纹会使大脑认为它们是同一颜色。因此我们必须非常仔细的观察图片，才会知道自己的眼睛是多么容易被蒙蔽。
这就是为什么我总是一次又一次的告诉别人：绝不要相信看到的东西，即使是亲眼所见。你的眼睛可不像摄像机那样忠诚的记录下周遭的一切。它们带着滤镜，而且大脑会自动诠释那些乱七八糟的信息。色彩不是看到的颜色，形状不是看见的形状（不管你信不信，上面那个放大的图片是正方形的），物体也不是看到的物体。
所以下一次，如果有人发誓自己看见了耶稣，UFO，或者撞到了鬼，就给他们看看这张图片。你在生活中看到的东西很可能会被证明并非如此。 |
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