Reality and perception are two very different things; that are commonly confused as the same thing, when in reality sometimes they aren't. They may be similar and have relations to one another, but they are not the same. One of the most recent examples of perception versus reality is “the dress.” On February 26, 2015, the dress went viral in a matter of days, after a picture of it was posted on Facebook. “It all began when Scottish singer Caitlin McNeill uploaded this picture with the question, "guys please help me - is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the f**k out."” (Vox Sentences: The Optics and Metaphysics of the Dress). This post resulted in many debates, questions, and research. …show more content…
“Even scientists who study color perception are baffled; Neuroscientist Jay Neitz said, “I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen”(Vox Sentences: The Optics and Metaphysics of the Dress). Though there is no definite reason as to why the colors of the dress are seen differently; there are many theories. One theory is that the color difference is a result of how the human brain perceives color & chromatic adaption. Color is not something that exists in the world. “Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors” (The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress). If the wavelengths hit our eye at different lengths, our brain gets to decide how to interpret that color. Maybe the people who saw the colors blue and black interpreted the wavelengths differently compared to those who saw white and gold. This would explain all the confusion among peer …show more content…
Perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through your senses. Now this may be the definition, but our senses are not always correct. The dress is the perfect example of this; our senses played tricks on our brains. Our eyes saw one thing, so we perceived it that way, when in actuality we were wrong and it was just perception fooling our brains. Back to the question though, yes perception does affect the way we see and process information. For example, if somebody holds up a blank piece of white paper, our eyes see and sense a blank piece of paper. Thus making our brains perceive that the object in question is a blank piece of white