YANSS 176 – How socks and Crocs reveal the science behind why we can share an opinion about something that doesn’t feel like an opinion

Priors are what neuroscientists and philosophers call the years of experience and regularity leading up to the present. All the ways a ball has bounced, all the ways a pancake has tasted, the way the dogs in your life have barks, or bitten, or hugged you when you were sad — these all shape the brain, literally. They form and prune our neural networks, so in situations that are uncertain, unfamiliar or ambiguous, we depend on those priors to help us disambiguate the new information coming into the brain via our senses.

But what happens when we don’t share those priors?

This episode is about the science behind The Dress, why some people see it as black and blue, and others see it as white and gold. But it’s also about how the scientific investigation of The Dress lead to the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs, and how the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs may be, as one researcher told me, the nuclear bomb of cognitive neuroscience.

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[image error]“How do people construct the subjective reality they inhabit?” That’s the question at the center of the work of Pascal Wallisch, who studies how human beings differ in the their interpretations of the objective truth. As part of that work, he has been the go-to scientist when it comes to making sense of The Dress, the Yanny/Laurel illusion, and several other viral phenomena on the internet. In 2017, he produced a study explaining exactly why some people saw the dress as one color, and others saw it as another. And in 2019, he produced another study replicating the conditions of the dress in the lab using socks and Crocs. 

[image error]Michael Karlovich is a cognitive scientist and vision researcher who explores “computational methods to create digital art, and to combine these novel methods with principles of visual-neuroscience and gestalt psychology to produce visual displays that ‘captures the brain’s attention,’ and further, produce positive impressions within a majority of viewers.” 

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Links and Sources

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud 

Pascal Wallisch Website

Pascal Wallisch Twitter

Michael Karlovich’s Website

The Debate that Broke the Internet

The Drama that Divided the Planet

Exploring the Roots of Disagreement with Crocs and Socks

Illumination assumptions account for individual differences in the perceptual interpretation of a profoundly ambiguous stimulus in the color domain: “The Dress”

[image error]There are no red pixels in this created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka



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