Why #TheDress caused a worldwide existential crisis

Why #TheDress caused a worldwide existential crisis

Over the past 24 hours, a black and blue (or is it gold and white?) dress has managed to turn the entire Internet-connected world on its head.

What started as a genuine plea to settle a friendly argument over the color of a dress instantaneously morphed into one of the Internet's most divisive debates, forcing everyone from John Boehner to Taylor Swift to God to choose a side. Not even Kim and Kanye could agree. This dress was seriously tearing us apart!

#TheDress blossomed into a meme at almost record-breaking speed, with neuroscientists and ophthalmologists around the country waking up Friday morning to inboxes full of media requests. But as this morning’s explainers on the science of visual perception start to be replaced by think pieces on the merits of memes, it's worth dwelling — for a few minutes, at least — on what drove the dress frenzy in the first place.

“I don’t understand this odd dress debate and I feel like it’s a trick somehow,” wrote Taylor Swift in a tweet that has been shared over 100,000 times. “I’m confused and scared. PS it’s OBVIOUSLY BLUE AND BLACK.”

Swift’s allegiance to the B team aside, the pop star once again proved herself to be the voice of the people, perfectly encapsulating the driving force behind the dress phenomenon: confusion and fear.

How could so many people look at the exact same photo and see such drastically different colors? Whether you saw white and gold or black and blue, both versions were so bold, it was impossible to comprehend how someone could possibly see any color combination other than the one in front of you — hence the impassioned tweets. This had to be a hoax. But looking at the photo next to someone else in real life not only proved that it wasn’t a hoax, it further stoked our anxiety. Is my co-worker colorblind? Am I colorblind? Are colors even real? Is anything real?! The series of expert interviews that popped up in #TheDress’s wake — desperately seeking a scientific explanation — were further proof of the profound discomfort this photo had caused.

In short, the scientific answer — which you can read about in greater detail here, here, and pretty much anywhere — is that a combination of bad lighting in the photo and the light in which the photo is viewed dramatically heightens the usually more subtle differences in how we all interpret color.

That might be enough to quell our communal existential crisis, but professional mindbender Jason Silva says the conversation shouldn’t end there.

“The larger takeaway from this is that we all exist in our own reality tunnel,” Silva told Yahoo News. “Nobody sees color the same way, no one sees the world the same way. This picture is an extreme example bringing that to the forefront and making our brains explode in the process.”

Silva is a self-described “performance philosopher” and filmmaker whom the Atlantic once described as “a Timothy Leary for the Viral Video Age.” On his National Geographic Channel show “Brain Games,” Silva illustrates how our minds process all kinds of information, including color. The clip below offers a visual explanation of the dress phenomenon.



“This is what we do on the show all the time,” Silva said. But he hopes the virality of #TheDress meme will spark a larger philosophical discussion about how humans measure reality — uncomfortable as it may be.

“We need our illusions, we need to agree and have a consensus that the world makes sense, that we are experiencing the world in the same way as our peers in order to feel like we’re not alone, that we’re not crazy,” Silva said.

This “consensus trance,” he said, is what “makes us able to work together as a society.” But in reality, each of us perceives the world completely differently. Usually, those differences are subtle enough that they don’t cause significant disagreements. As in, the green that I see is not the same as the green you see, but we both can agree on Kermit the Frog’s color.

With the dress, Silva said, “because we’re not looking at it from the same point of view we can’t agree on a consensus, and it’s unsettling because it makes us question the reliability of our everyday assumptions.”

“That’s why people are so freaked out,” he explained. “It seems like a trivial thing, but it’s giving people an ontological questioning of their world."

In other words: "The very essence of how you measure reality is being put into question by something as trivial as this dress.”