Different but Equal

It happens sometimes to read on a snack the following notice: “with chocolate taste”, written in uppercase. This statement tricks our mind! In fact, the vast majority of us think that such a snack MUST contain chocolate, no one thought however that a flavor is not a substance and most probably the snack we bit into contains only an ‘illusion’ of chocolate.

The same occurs with colors, our brain is easily tricked by them! Colors are just like ‘flavors’, they may smell, pardon... look like a specific color, but they are just an illusory subjective sensation, not an ‘external’ reality. Colors undoubtedly change depending on their surrounding or the context in which they are viewed. More mind-blowing still is the fact that colors that are identical may appear to be different under certain conditions, and colors that are different may look the same. Such a curious effect is called “color induction”.

Even the texture of an object can influence the color shades. For instance, both the beer and the egg yolk have exactly the same orange hue and shaded tones. However, our brain assumes that the glass and the drink are translucent thus the colors appear lighter or duller, while the colors of the yolk of the fried egg seem more consistent and darker.

Test the subjectivity of color vision