Relax, people. There's a scientific reason why we don't agree on the color of #TheDress

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Podcasts Take Two

Feb 27, 2015

Listen • 5:21

Relax, people. There's a scientific reason why we don't agree on the color of #TheDress

An viral image of a dress is driving everyone bonkers on social media. Some people see it as white and gold, some see it as blue and black. Turns out, there's a scientific reason why.

An viral image of a dress is driving everyone bonkers on social media. Some people see it as white and gold, some see it as blue and black. Turns out, there's a scientific reason why.

An image of a striped dress is driving everyone bonkers on social media. Some people see the dress as white and gold. Some see it as blue and black.

It's driving the Take Two staff crazy too - and we wanted to find out the science behind why people see this dress differently. Lucky for us, Adam Rogers wrote about this for Wired.

Rogers and his colleagues at Wired tested the image using Photoshop to see if they could decide once and for all what color the dress in the image is. They came close.

But Rogers also spoke to a couple of neuroscientists who study color and vision. And as it turns out, the reason people see this image differently has to do with the way human brains evolved to see color in a sunlit world.