[imagesource:pixabay]

A recent meme has been messing with a lot of people’s minds and in a way, it’s similar to the ‘black and blue, or white and gold dress’ mindf*** from the last decade.

The Dress, as it became known, was a viral phenomenon on the Internet in 2015. Viewers disagreed on whether the dress depicted in a photograph was coloured black and blue, or white and gold.

The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception, which have been the subject of ongoing scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science, producing a number of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The recent addition to the messing with your perception meme is however just as weird. And yes, it is again dependent on our perception of the world around you. Perception is after all reality. If the dress is black and blue to you, then it’s black and blue.

3Sixty Insights have thankfully done most of the cerebral work with this new ‘phenomenon’. So before we scratch around in that melon of yours, take a look (and listen) to the below video:

Ignoring the lightsaber intro for a moment, what did you hear?  Green Needle or Brainstorm?

The reality is that you are hearing both.

The audio in the video is simply looping both Green Needle and Brainstorm one after the other, but your brain is taking in the suggestive word you are looking at and overpowering the reality of what is being heard. Sometimes our incredible brains will replace reality with sounds, colours, and objects that are not there, based upon additional information being processed, or in some cases, not processed.

This explains how it is possible for two people to be exposed to the same facts or information, yet experience completely different variations of it. Or at least, interpret it in different ways.

This is particularly relevant in our over-saturated social media-heavy world.

Fundamentally, by seeing certain themes in a repetitive nature, your brain begins to program itself to see that very same thing elsewhere. Like in the video above, by simply looking at a word in a colored box, your brain begins to complete the rest of the story via the audio track.

To be completely honest, did you really even hear any of the two words? Or did you just ‘fill in the blanks’ after reading the coloured text? Your perception of the sound might have just followed on from there. In truth, both answers can be correct.

It’s this ‘paradox of perception’ that allows us to have different opinions and experiences from those around us. In a way, it makes your reality real.

So was the dress black and blue, or white and gold? Yes. Did the audio say green needle or brainstorm? Yes.

[source:3sixtyinsights]