Louis Dor
Mar 02, 2017
@AkiyoshiKitaoka/Twitter/Screengrab
Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a Professor of Psychology at the College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, in Kyoto, Japan.
As we've established before, he's behind a majority of the most devious optical illusions on the internet.
He's come up with another one, which he recently tweeted:
There are no red pixels in the image.
We checked it out, he's right, obviously.
Picture: @AkiyoshiKitaoka/Twitter/Screengrab
It's definitely a neutral grey.
So how is the illusion done?
Colour constancy - your brain is attempting to colour correct the world in different light - it expects to see red strawberries, so tries to.
Bevil Conway, an expert from the National Eye Institute, told Vice:
If you imagine walking around outside under a blue sky, that blueness is, in some sense, colour-contaminating everything you see.
In this picture, someone has very cleverly manipulated the image so that the objects you're looking at are reflecting what would otherwise be achromatic or grayscale, but the light source that your brain interprets to be on the scene has got this blueish component.
You brain says, 'The light source that I'm viewing these strawberries under has some blue component to it, so I'm going to subtract that automatically from every pixel.' And when you take grey pixels and subtract out this blue bias, you end up with red.
If you like optical illusions he's worth a follow.
You'll get more brain-melting images such as these:
We need a lie down.
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