#TheDress

By: Bella Dalba

On the evening of February 26, 2015, our world was forever changed by the emergence of a photo. Caitlin McNeill, a member of a Scottish folk music group named ‘Canach,’ first discovered it on Facebook. Her band had been booked to play at their friends,’ Grace and Keir Johnston’s, wedding. Grace had been sent a photo of the dress her mother planned to wear, so that she (the bride) knew what she planned to wear to the ceremony. Due to the quality of the photo, however, both Grace and Keir were unsure whether the dress depicted was blue and black, or white and gold. She re-posted the photo to Facebook and asked for the opinions of others, which sparked discussion.
McNeill saw the picture and began discussing it with her bandmates, remarking that, “We almost didn't make it on stage because we were so caught up discussing this dress.” Unable to come to a conclusion, she then re-posted the image on a Tumblr blog she operated and asked the same question to her followers, which led to further public discussion surrounding the image. Later in the day, the dress went viral internationally, with Hollywood celebrities, athletes, and politicians all weighing in on the great dress debate. Users took to hashtags such as “#whiteandgold,” “#blueandblack,” and "#dressgate" to discuss their opinions on what the color of the dress was, and theories surrounding their arguments. Some perceived the dress changing colors on its own, or attributed the variances in what people saw to recent positive/negative experiences, though the photo also attracted discussion relating to the triviality of the matter as a whole. The Washington Post described the dispute as “the drama that divided a planet.”
This same question of profound existential purpose swept through the hallways of Seckman High School, and every student and teacher took sides: “The dress is white and gold. You have to physically tilt the screen to “see” the black and blue. It’s nothing but the negative,” argues Ashleigh Stewart, a senior at SHS. Junior Hannah LaBelle disagrees: “There is only one angle that you can see the white and gold. The dress can’t be white when, looking directly at the picture, all you see is black. It’s a subjective illusion! You’re only seeing gold because you’ve already decided that’s what you were going to see.”
Soon after, professionals in the fields of neuroscience and vision began providing scientific commentary on the optical illusion: neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe that the differences in opinions are a result of how the human brain perceives color. Conway believes that it has a connection to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky, explaining that "people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.”
Neitz agreed, saying: "Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance...but I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen.” Other scientists have suggested that the colors are not truly perceived differently by different people, but that this is an example of Crowd Syndrome, a theory which explains the phenomena of large numbers of people acting in the same way at the same time.