The Relativity of Color

• Put your focus onto the black cross above and you will notice the colors begin to disappear.  If you concentrate, you can make the entire field go nearly to white.  Holding your eyes very still you will see very little color.  
• The instant you move your eyes or blink, the colors instantly re-appear.  
• See a digitized example of the Troxler effect (works better than the color woodblock version above).

This is a demonstration of our theory at work.  Small, rapid eye movement, a phenomena called micro-cicades, are what stimulate our optic nerves, especially the cone cells involved in color perception, to send the nerve signals to our brains which help us to "see" color.  Without eye movement, we will see no color. 

Ming writes:

• "Neural adaptation is a decrease over time in the responsiveness of the sensory system to a constant stimulus. For example, when you put on a hat, the hat is immediately felt by your head. Later, however, the sensation of the hat on your head diminishes, you might sometimes almost forget that you are wearing a hat.  In the visual domain, neural adaptation leads to visual after-effects. For example, immediately after you stare at a waterfall for a while, looking at a still object would make you feel the object moves upward.  Neural adaptation also leads to the Troxler fading above." 

Matt adds: 

• "It is an idea of our theory that it is the active nature of visual perception, the fact that our eyes are continually moving and assessing visual relationships (light of differing wavelengths), that creates our sensation of color.  ETOC (The Energy Theory of Color) describers color relationships as a measure of energy differences. We believe it is relevant and useful to think of visual perception as a process of assessing energy relationships in our world."

The Gelb effect demonstrates that our perception of dark/light relationships are also relative, just as are our perception of colors.  You can get an interactive sense of this by following this interactive link.

Color Constancy describes how our brains input relational information, especially clues related to light and light sources, in our assessment of color relationships.  In the above example the squares with the arrows appear very different in their color hue . . .

but actually they are the same color!

This is an example drawn from Albers' Interaction of Color.  

If you fixate on the black dot in the image on the left for 10 seconds or so, and then move your gaze to the black dot on the right, you will experience an after image that is a complement in color sensation to the image on the left.

We have more to work out in our assessment of sensory fading, but currently we postulate that a view of our visual senses as primarily involved in assessing energy relationships would explain that our eyes will "make up for" and "compensate for" visual stimuli, especially the energy relationships of visual stimuli, in the same way that our tactile senses are shaped by sensations of warm or cold in Albers' example of the three pots of water described at the top of this page.

Do you remember this image going viral on the internet some years back?

Some saw the dress as blue with gold bands and some saw it as white with black bands.  Once you joined one or the other of the two camps it seemed very difficult to imagine how folks could see it otherwise. 

Ming has explained an explanation of the difference in how we see the colors in this photo can be found in color constancy.  Our brains have made differing assumptions about the light source, assumptions our conscious minds are not aware of.  

Still curious?

It turns out whether we see the dress is blue or white is directed by whether we see the dress as backlit or in direct light.  These assumptions have to do with subtle cues in the photo that are ambiguous.  Our brains make this determination without telling us  we have made this choice.  To find out more you'll need to participate in one or more of our talks, or buy our book, when it comes out!