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This simple photo of strawberries will blow your mind

Okay, everyone. Hold on tight, this one might blow your mind.

This is a photo of strawberries. They appear to be red to you, but there isn’t a single red pixel used in it:

What the what!? But … they’re red. They look red. Strawberries are red. The dress is white and gold (no, it’s blue and black oh God I’m so confused).

Actually, The Dress that Broke the Internet in 2015 will help us here. From Vice:

While this time everybody is seeing the same thing, the optical illusion is created through a similar phenomenon that caused so much turmoil with The Dress. It’s called color constancy. It’s your brain’s way of color correcting the world when it’s filtered through different light.

When you look around the world, the light that enters your eye is made of different wavelengths that come from both the pigments of the objects around you and the light that illuminates them.

Uhhhh … what? Still confused. National Eye Institute’s Bevil Conway broke it down further for Vice:

“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,” Conway told me. “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.”

Much better, still amazing. Also amazing: Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s Twitter feed:

Whoa.

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