Today the Huff Post Weird News section reports that a man in Glasgow, Scotland has seen the face of God (the savior, to be precise) in a bathroom door. Of an Ikea.

My last report on sightings of Our Lord and Savior was about 7 months ago, so I thought it was time for an update. Pareidolia is one of my favorite topics, as its readers may know from my my many previous posts on the subject. If you don’t know what pareidolia is, that last link (this one) covers the definition. I have also written a classroom ‘module’ for the JREF on the topic. It can be downloaded for free here (the pdf is quite large; the site is here: http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/2208-new-jref-in-the-classroom-lessons.html).

I have a fairly extensive collection of images (under “Fun For Everyone” on the right) going back a few years, but new sightings shouldn’t be ignored and here are a few that I have missed and a few more that have appeared since my last report…

Jesus Shops at Walmart

In 2001, a couple in South Carolina found Jesus. On their Walmart receipt. One of them said, “…who else has the power to put their face on a check-out receipt but Jesus?”

It doesn’t look like Jesus to me. To me he looks like a sad Luke Danes on Gilmore girls.

Crabby Jesus

John Canfield found Mr. Crabs while on a trip with his family in Everett, Washington in 2012.

Gawker has suggested that the image looks more like Osama Bin Laden than Jesus. I have to agree, although I have never pictured Bin Laden sad, just angry. This guy looks sad. Like Jesus would be, if we are to believe the Bible.

Stingray Jesus

Also in 2012, Jesus appeared on the back of a cownose stingray. Guess it was an ocean phase.

Erika Sheldt, who photographed the creature, is catholic, but mildly skeptical. She didn’t think it was a message from God, but she noted the coincidence that Easter was around the corner.

“I just kind of thought it looked like a bearded homeless man,” Scheldt told IslandPacket.com “But when I posted pictures on Instagram, one of my friends was like, ‘That’s Jesus.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God. You’re right.'”

Jesus Poop

In 2013 Jesus came out of a bird and landed on the windshield of an Ohio man’s car.

Apparently, MSN thought it looked more like a dog wearing a wig. I’m not sure what to think.
 

God’s Signature

More recently, in 2014, a woman recovering from chemotherapy thinks that God was reassuring her when she found his name in the hair regrowing at the top of her head.

Cliff Jesus

And last month a tourist visiting Ireland snapped a picture of Jesus in the side of the Cliffs of Moher. Odd that nobody noticed him there before.
 

By now, you’ve either wondered just what color the dress is or you’re living under a rock in the middle of a deserted island with no internet and the first thing you chose to read when you were back online is my blog. Weird, but awesome.

The last few days have seen a flurry of education about our visual system and I won’t duplicate too many efforts here. But I would like to talk a bit about the illusion and the way the internet exploded with pseudoexplanations and other BS as a result. I’m going to spend a little more time on what this illusion does NOT mean.

First, the dress…

http://swiked.tumblr.com/post/ 112073818575/guys-please-help-me-is-this-dress-white-and

When the ugly white and gold dress first appeared in my feed last Thursday, I had the same reaction that I’m sure many of you did: this is a hoax.

I quickly determined that it was indeed real, immediately saw additional pictures of the blue and black dress, both in an online store and on the woman who wore it (BTW, as ugly as that dress is, she manages to pull it off), and started to think about what was happening. I fully accepted that the dress was actually blue and black, but I couldn’t perceive it that way in that photograph to save my life. It was fascinating!

At this point I should note that I have studied color vision and color perception since I was an undergrad. My first real experiment involved asking people to rate the facial expressions of expressionless faces drawn on backgrounds of different colors. The purpose of the study was to test the claims made… well, everywhere… that colors affect people’s emotions. I continued that line of research for more than 10 years and won several awards for it. My master’s thesis was titled “The Physiological Effects of Color on Human Emotion”. A summary of many years’ worth of findings is available here.

I also taught cognitive psychology (a portion of which involves sensation and perception) for several years and supervised a number of student experiments about color, some with very interesting results. What I am trying to say is that I have a good handle on what is causing the illusion. I was still mesmerized.

The illusion itself is not what I find so fascinating. What’s fascinating, and what caused it to blow up the internet, are the individual differences. Most polls only offered two possibilities, with about 70% claiming to see it as white and gold, 30% as blue and black, but I counted about 1 in 5 in my Facebook feed who said that it was sometimes white/gold and sometimes blue/black. I can recreate very similar illusions quickly using a basic drawing program, but illusions tend to be fairly universal. While we see some differences across cultures, mostly due to differing environments, I don’t think that I have ever seen people in the same household, looking at the same picture, perceive an image so differently and in a stable manner. Yet my youngest son saw only blue and black while the rest of the house saw white and gold. When it comes to ambiguous figures, such as the famous figure/ground image below, most people can perceive the image either way and reverse it at will. Of those who said that they sometimes saw the dress as white/gold and sometimes as blue/black, nobody I talked to said that they could switch the perception at will.

Do you see faces or a vase?

On Friday, post after post tumbled through my Facebook feed. The first posts I saw picked apart the image, extracting information about the color of the pixels. Well, that stuff is mostly irrelevant. Perception is much, much more than the simple sensation of the color of light hitting our eyes. The color of the dress in the photograph does not tell us the color of the dress (which we know from other sources) or why some people perceive the dress’s color as it is (blue/black) and some so differently (white/gold). Both, btw, are considered illusions since neither matches the pixels in the image, but nobody should perceive the dress as the pixel colors because they wouldn’t perceive it that way in person. Confused yet?

Next came all of the explanations. Some claimed to show us how we could perceive the dress differently, replete with not-quite-right explanations for why it’s happening. Yet I have met nobody who could force a different perception, at least not for more than a fraction of a second, much less using the methods suggested. Those doctored images just looked like doctored images to me. They did not change my perception that the dress was white with gold lace. Many gave some pretty bad explanations (those who saw blue/black do not have better color constancy). Some suggested that one’s sleep cycle could explain individual differences (it can’t). This guy says:

Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There’s rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part.

And that, my friends, is how a little bit of education can lead to dangerous things like deciding not to vaccinate your children. He has either skimmed Wikipedia’s entry on color theory or was half asleep through a half hour lecture in an intro psych class and now thinks he understands how eyes work.

And as of this writing that bit of BS has been RTed over eight thousand times.

My favorite bogus explanation: Mood. The color you see depends on your mood. That’s the one my kids heard the most during school that day.

And the jokes. Oh, the jokes. Some, like XKCD, were 10 kinds of awesome (make sure you read the alt text, and if you don’t get it, read this post). Others were not so funny.

Then, late Friday evening, after I’d taken a bit of a break from “the dress”, someone sent me this video and all hell broke loose. The video content isn’t relevant; it’s just a fun look at how to correct the photo. What is relevant is that suddenly the dress was BLUE AND BLACK. Not brown, not like an altered photo of a white and gold dress, but blue and black–the same royal blue that is in the other photos. I thought maybe the image in the video had been altered, so I pulled up a blog post with the original picture and it looked the same. I Googled “what color is this dress” and looked at the images. I saw a sea of blue/black dresses with one white/gold one in the corner. It looked to me like someone had replaced most of the pictures on the internet!

Since then the dress color switches for me. I usually see it as white with gold lace, but now and again it’s deep blue with black lace.

And I know why, yet I am helpless to control it.

And over the weekend, I started to see about-the-dress-here’s-some-more-BS-about-color-vision posts. Business Insider, which is becoming more and more like Buzzfeed every day, posted a number of pieces of varying quality. One of them had the unfortunate title, “No one could see the color blue until modern times”. The piece itself isn’t bad. It speculates about the effect that naming colors has on perceiving colors. There is some evidence that cultures which fail to distinguish between blue and green perceive fewer distinct hues in that area of the spectrum, but to extract from that the idea that human beings didn’t “see” blue until they had a name for it? Well, that’s a preposterous leap that’s actually a bit silly. Why would they name something that didn’t exist?

Another which has been picking up steam in the last couple of days is this incredibly bad piece on linkedin which makes the bold claim that 25% of people have a 4th cone that allows them to “see colors as they are”. It’s a very strange thing to claim–to “see colors as they are”, since colors are simply the brain’s interpretation of wavelengths of light. In that sense, colors aren’t. They kind of don’t exist. The article talks about tetrachromacy, which is a real phenomenon, but the author basically made up the rest. I cannot fully explain color vision (or vision in general) in a blog post, but I can tell you this is wrong. Also, tetrachromacy is extremely rare, at least in functional form, and her “test” is totally bogus. The author calls herself “Prof. Diana Derval, expert in neuromarketing”. I know that it’s trendy to slap “neuro” onto everything, but really? Neuromarketing? Ugh. I first saw and responded to the piece on Facebook Sunday night and by Monday afternoon Snopes had covered it (they did a nice job, too, but they usually do), but that didn’t keep it from going viral.

So what is going on with the dress?

Well, several pieces have explained it with relative accuracy. I said I wouldn’t duplicate those efforts and I won’t. I will instead recommend that you read/watch more than one of those links, take a look at the additional illusions that I created below, and internalize this perfect summation:

“It’s an illusion,” said [David] Whitney. “But everything is an illusion.”

And that’s the long and short of it. What we “see” is never, ever exactly what’s out there in the world. It’s our brain’s best interpretation of what’s out there. We are amazingly good at it, but it’s not perfect and perfection is not possible.

The grey bar in the middle is a solid color. We only perceive it as darker on one side than the other because of contrast with the surrounding color.

Although one bird appears to be more orange than the other, they are identical.

Those who read this blog in its early days know of my love for all things pareidolia. If you don’t know what pareidolia is, that last link (this one) covers the definition. I have also written an classroom ‘module’ for the JREF on the topic. It can be downloaded for free here (the pdf is quite large; the site is here: http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/2208-new-jref-in-the-classroom-lessons.html).

I have a fairly extensive collection of images (under “Fun For Everyone” on the right), but I have not updated it in a while, so I thought it would be fun to see what people have been seeing. I was not disappointed.

Yesterday, reports of a man seeing Jesus in his chicken made the rounds. According to WNEP, Ernesto Hernandez was sitting down to dinner with his wife at their home in the Poconos (that’s in Pennsylvania) when he saw this:

Screenshot of WNEP broadcast regarding Ernesto Hernandez’s chicken

But that’s not the only recent sighting of Jesus. A few days ago there was a sighting in his mother’s arms in a tree trunk in Iowa:

Screenshot of broadcast by KCCI

Then there’s last month’s appearance in the smoke of a house fire. Well, it’s in a video capture of the smoke and the face appears just as someone in the video says “There’s someone still in the building!” while a guy carries a man out. A neighbor in an NBC News video says, “You see Jesus in the smoke and the person gets saved? That right there is not a coincidence.” Well, yeah, it is, especially when both the “see Jesus in the smoke” part and the “person gets saved” part are questionable. I actually liked what a priest in the video had to say.

But for me, the true face of God, the true image of God, was the man carrying his neighbor out on his shoulders.

For me, that’s simply a demonstration of what humans are capable of. It’s beautiful, but I don’t need God to explain it and I don’t understand why anyone would want to give God that glory when a human being deserves the praise.

And back in August, Jesus towered over HuffPo blogger Fiona Finn (btw, I have to say that I have a seriously difficult time taking seriously someone who describes herself in a byline as “keynote speaker”) in Cape Coral, Florida in cloud form:

via link to Huffington Post

Just the color of the room can play a huge role in how we feel and act. Paint the walls blue, and studies show you may be more creative. Paint them red, and you may be more vigilant or more sexy. Change to green to calm yourself down. But if you really want something off the wall, paint those walls a certain shade of pink.

I call Bullshit.

This is a quote from a CBS News segment posted online last year.

They are hardly the first to make such claims. My husband, who is an art director by trade, was taught many of these myths as fact in his color theory course at Savannah College of Art and Design. You can find claims like these in books, magazines (including self-described science-based magazines), and all over the internet. They are so ubiquitous that I made the effects of color on emotion my first research project as a psychology undergrad, then continued the work for more than a decade, including a Master’s thesis on the topic.

But 95% of them are bullshit.

What you’ll find when you look up the sources cited (if there are any) for most of these claims is usually a book written by a man named Faber Birren, which includes a list of citations of journal articles, most of which were written by him. And what you’ll find when you read these articles is that his research methods are seriously, seriously flawed. In fact, most research on color is seriously flawed, usually because the researcher(s) failed to consider the anatomy of the eye and the very meaning of “color”–what it is and how it is produced. One need not earn PhDs in physics and physiology, but some basic knowledge of the visible light spectrum is needed, as is an understanding of the way cells in the retina are structured.

I won’t go into those things here, of course, but I will warn you that once you’re armed with that knowledge, a lot of these claims don’t make much sense.

When I set out to study this problem all those years ago, I noted three fundamental challenges that most researchers failed to meet:

1. Defining colors: Much of the older research uses simple terms like “blue” and “red”, which ignores properties of color such as saturation and brightness. There is no way for another researcher to replicate a study without very specific information about the colors used, how they were produced, and how they were displayed. It is also rare in the literature to find control of ambient lighting.



2. Defining emotions: Emotion is not as simple as most of us tend to think. For example, think about what “grief” means to you. Is it a quiet, calm feeling? Is it the urge to curl up in a ball? Or is it a loud, angry feeling–the urge to hit something?
3. Eliminating alternative hypotheses for outcomes: This is perhaps the most important and most challenging issue for any research, but it is especially challenging in the social sciences. Much of the research on color fails miserably when it comes to eliminating other, more plausible explanations for outcomes. For example, in some studies, people were simply asked, “How does this color make you feel?” The participant then provides a cognitive appraisal that includes learned associations of the color with emotions. They think about what that color means to them and make a decision about it. That’s not an emotional reaction to color. It’s an emotional reaction to associations they have with the color.

Once I addressed these issues in my own research, my findings were fairly consistent across experiments and over time, even when I addressed them in different ways. If you are interested, you can find an explanation of some of my experiments here.

What’s more, what I found certainly does not support the vast majority of claims about how color affects emotion and it does not support most of what was stated in this CBS piece. Let’s look at each claim and compare them to what I found in repeated experiments.

Just the color of the room can play a huge role in how we feel and act.

Well, that’s just a presumptuous and vague statement and, in my opinion, it is simply not true.

Paint the walls blue, and studies show you may be more creative.

Uh, no. I’m not even sure where this one came from. I’ve never seen a study with that outcome and I’d be very surprised if there was one that couldn’t be ripped to shreds by a mild critique. Many of these myths seem to have sprung from cultural associations.

While I was studying the effects of color on emotion as a psychology undergrad, I studied cultural associations with color as part of a minor in anthropology. It’s a fascinating topic. Data from the original World Color Survey in the 1970s suggested that the more complex a society, the more colors distinct colors they recognized with different names. I suspected that their associations with color (e.g., red with anger) would follow a similar pattern. I used a wonderful tool called the Human Relations Area Files [HRAF] to search ethnographies for references to color associations.

My hypothesis was supported, but what I also found interesting was that associations for a few basic colors were very similar. Red was almost always associated with vitality of some sort, black with danger or evil, and white with goodness and purity. This would make sense, given that darkness can be dangerous and blood, which is essential for life, is red. However, as the colors moved away from these basic colors, the associations were more and more diverse. In some cultures blue was associated with calm, in some with energy.

Paint them red, and you may be more vigilant or more sexy.

This is perhaps the only claim that even comes close to reality. The findings of my studies have not always shown effects, but when they do, red is always the most arousing. It usually produces more arousal than yellow and blue. But “arousing” does not mean “sexy”. Sexual arousal is only one type, one context, of arousal. All arousal means is that your heart is beating a little faster than when you are not aroused (and there other physical, measurable responses).

Change to green to calm yourself down.

And this is where they totally blow it. Another consistent finding in my research is that green is often more arousing than yellow and blue. It sometimes not statistically different from red, in fact. It does differ from red in that it is usually rated as more pleasant (participants don’t know that they are rating a color).

When you understand the opponent properties of retinal ganglion cells, this makes sense. The idea that red is arousing while green is calming does not.

But if you really want something off the wall, paint those walls a certain shade of pink.

And this is where I have to laugh. As the piece notes, there are entire books written about “Baker-Miller Pink”, the shade of pink used to paint a set of prison cells because the warden was certain that the color was responsible for a calmer inmate population. The problem? No well-designed and replicated research supports this claim. Furthermore, given that pink is simply a light shade of red, this effect would contradict all of my findings.

But what you really want to know is how color affects emotions, right? You want to know what color to paint your bedroom walls?

Paint them any color you like.

You see, while I have found reliable differences in emotions due to hue (and sometimes brightness), the effects are fleeting. The human visual system adapts so quickly that once you’ve spent a few minutes, or even a few seconds, in a room, any effects the color had on your body are pretty much gone. In fact, when you’re paying attention to another person, a television, a computer screen, a task, or anything else, you’re no longer even processing the color of the walls.

Dragon*Con is now just over three weeks away and the schedule is as solid as these things get, so I’m giving you the highlights as promised. I will be one BUSY Skeptic! [Edit: By the way, Dragon*Con will take place over Labor Day weekend, September 3rd through 6th.]

For those who have not heard of it, Dragon*Con an enormous SciFi/Fantasy convention held in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend. Skeptrack, the skeptic fan track, is the brainchild of Derek Colonduno and Robynn McCarthy (A.K.A., “Swoopy”), hosts of Skepticality. As usual, they work their butts off and many skepticism activists do their best to make that work count by participating in talks and panels designed to spread the critical thinking bug to geeks everywhere.

Dragon*Con is very different from conventions like The Amaz!ng Meeting, and not just the costumes. TAM is, at heart, a Dog-and-Pony-Show for skepticism. At Dragon*Con activists do the work of activism and education. There are a number of fan tracks, including a Podcasting Track directed by Swoopy, and Space & Science Tracks, who work closely with Derek and Swoopy. In addition to the obvious Star Wars Track, Trek Track, and Whedonverse Track, there are literature, costuming, and writing tracks. There are also two tracks related to Skeptrack: Paranormal Track and X Track.

The former is self-explanatory, I hope, and this year I will be attending a workshop on that track by Ben Radford on investigating the paranormal (details below). I am very interested in the methods used for this kind of thing as they differ a great deal from the kind of work that I do.

Last year most of Skeptrack was streamed live, but there were some problems. I believe they will try this again this year with, hopefully, fewer headaches. If so, I will provide a link on Facebook and Twitter as soon as it is available, which might be as late as the first day.

If you are attending or planning to stream it live, here is where and when you can find me:

Skepticism, Scams, & Consumerism: Ranging from psychology behind sales to consumer rights, we discuss how as skeptics we identify and challenge dodgy products and pseudosciences.
Time: Friday 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
I will be moderating this panel and talking about the psychology of purchasing behavior. Panelists include Matt Lowry, Rachael Dunlop, Richard Saunders, & Tom Merritt.

The Calculus Diaries – Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, Survive a Zombie Apocalypse: Fun examples of math applications in the real world and why it’s important to understand even just the basic concepts.
Time: Friday 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Location: Hilton 202
This panel is on the Science Track and will mostly be the work of Jennifer Ouellette, whose book with that title will be released August 1st, just in time for me to read it on the plane. As a statistician, I hope I can contribute something worthwhile to the discussion.

How Your Brain Works, and How to Fool It: Our perception of reality is driven more by expectation, belief, and desire than by sensory input. An examination of how we fool ourselves.
Time: Friday 8:30pm – 9:30pm
Location: Hilton 202
NOTE: This is not the original title and I think it is a little misleading. The original title was “What You See Is [not always] What You Get (or WYSInaWYG)”. The topic is not about how to fool your brain, but how your brain fools you. I believe Jason Schneiderman plans to join me and would be a welcome addition.

Skepticism and Sexuality: When do we get skeptical about sex, the media? When alien cults want to save African clitorises, this panel is here to discuss the facts.
Time: Friday 10:00pm – 11:00pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
I will bring with me some of the most interesting myths about the psychology of sex, courtesy of my friend a colleague who teaches the best course on the topic evah. My fellow panelists include Heidi Anderson, Ben Radford, Kylie Sturgess, & Ginger Campbell. Desiree Schell will moderate.

Naturally Skeptical? The Psychology Behind Being a Skeptic: A round table discussion on the factors that do (and don’t!) contribute to becoming a questioner of the paranormal and pseudoscientific.
Time: Saturday 10:00am – 11:00am
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
I will once again take the reigns as moderator and lead a discussion of the psychology of critical thinking and open-mindedness. I am very pleased that Scott Lilienfeld has decided to join us. He has written quite a bit about pseudoscience in our field, including his latest collaboration, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior. Other panelists, who are not exactly chopped liver themselves, include D.J. Grothe, Matt Lowry, Kylie Sturgess, & Pamela Gay.

Mathematical Modeling Pitfalls: Model don’t always accurately reflect messy reality, particularly where human behavior is concerned. Algorithms can only mimic human behavior, and there is a lot of room for bias and error as a result.
Time: Sunday 11:30am – 12:30pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
I am not actually on the schedule for this, but Jennifer Ouellete invited me to contribute when I mentioned my love-hate relationship with modeling and my frustrations in teaching that models are not what they model. If I get it together in time, I will present what I think is a cool visual of what you can do with a simple model that shows how they can be effective science. Well, I think it’s cool, anyway!

Raising Skeptical Geeks: A few known skeptical parents talk about issues and how they a raising their kids to be better rational thinkers.
Time: Sunday 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Location: Hilton Crystal Ballroom
This is sure to be the highlight of my Dragon*Con experiences as I love to talk about my kids. I am collecting stories and funny quotes to share. I am also thrilled that fellow panelists will be three good friends and one of the geekiest dads (by all appearances) around: Daniel Loxton, Heidi Anderson, Desiree Schell, & Adam Savage.

Skepticism and Education: JREF now has a Director of Educational Programs – what else is being done out there and how can skeptics help educate the next generation?
Time: Sunday 4:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Of course this is on my list of favorites as well as one of the most important of the panels on which I will serve. Other panelists include D.J. Grothe, Michael Blanford, Daniel Loxton, Pamela Gay, & Matt Lowry. Kylie Sturgess will moderate.

Women: Myths, Feminism And Skepticism: Puzzled by feminine mystique? Searching for your ‘Inner Velma’? Join investigators on gender, pop-culture and what science REALLY tells us!
Time: Monday 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Oh, so many myths, so little time! This topic is rich and Heidi Anderson, Desiree Schell, Pamela Gay, Kylie Sturgess, and myself are looking forward to a fact-packed dicussion.

Skeptrack Sign-Off Wrap Up and Feedback: Join the skeptrack guests and speakers for a discussion about how things went, last minute news, and how we can make things better next year!
Time: Monday 4:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Unfortunately, I will not make this discussion and also make my flight home. I am sure, though, that there will be much greatness in the room.

That wraps up my obligations. Here are just a few the events I am looking forward to attending as an audience member (if possible – the * indicates an event I cannot attend due to a scheduling conflict, but recommend):

CSI: Paranormal
Time: Friday 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: Joe Nickell

*Skeptically Speaking Live!
Time: Friday 8:30pm – 9:30pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: Desiree Schell

Skeptical Coffee Talk
Time: Saturday 8:30am – 9:30am
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: James Randi, D.J. Grothe, & Joe Nickell

Paranormal Investigation Workshop
Time: Saturday 1:00pm – 3:30pm
Location: Sheraton
Presenters/Panel Members: Ben Radford

*I Very Much Doubt That!
Time: Saturday 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Hilton Crystal Ballroom
Presenters/Panel Members: James Randi

*Mystery Investigators Children’s Show
Time: Saturday 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: Richard Saunders & Rachael Dunlop

Monster Talk Podcast Live
Time: Saturday 4:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: Blake Smith & Ben Radford

Skeptic Zone Live!
Time: Sunday 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: Richard Saunders, Rachael Dunlop, Kylie Sturgess, & Brian Brushwood

Skepticism 2.0: Blogging
Time: Monday 11:30am – 12:30pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: Daniel Loxton, Rebecca Watson, Brian Dunning, Rachael Dunlop, & Kylie Sturgess

Martial Arts Mysticism
Time: Monday 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Hilton 205/206/207
Presenters/Panel Members: John Clements

You can find the full schedules as they become available on the track websites. I hope to see you there!

I am very interested in learning something and I need your help to do it. So, if you could, take a look at the picture below without reading any of the comments, then post a comment of your own describing what you see that is beyond the obvious.

In other words, does this look like anything other than what it clearly is? If so, what?

By the way, if you have seen this image before (it was tweeted this morning), please say so.

Then, move on to the previous post to find out what I “saw” and what I hope to learn.

Scroll down for comments!

SPOILER!!

Read this post first, please.

SPOILER STARTS HERE

Here’s the story…

I caught this tweet this morning:
@BadAstronomer: Beam me up some breakfast. Warp factor three egg omelette. http://twitpic.com/27mfxu

I will pretty much click on anything that starts with “beam me up”, so I did and, as you know, I saw this:

Well, I really saw this:

I even heard theme music in my head. I imagined “NCC-1701″ written on the hull in salsa. Because the original series is the cornerstone and James T. Kirk is the greatest captain of all time, space, film, and literature.

But… would I have perceived it as such if:

• the tweet did not include references to Star Trek?
• the tweet was not from Phil Plait, whom I know to be an avid fellow scifi fanatic?
• the tweet was not from Phil Plait, whom I know to be at Comic-con right now for several reasons?
• I was not lamenting not being at Comic-con myself?
• had not just rearranged a shelf on which our Original Series collection sat, taunting me?

Would Phil Plait had perceived the icon of the god that is Captain James T. Kirk if he were not at Comic-con? If he were not a sci-fi fanatic? You get the picture.

The experience of seeing the DVDs or being at (or thinking about) Comic-con is called a “prime” in the psychological literature, because it activates related information, lowering your perceptual threshold for it. The prime prepares you, in a way, to receive related input.

The tweet itself is a suggestion; it is information about to experience. You then use, in part, top-down processes to interpret the image given that information.

Some good examples of how this works using another sense (hearing) can be found in one of my first blog entries about a very naughty Elmo doll.

Priming effects sometimes confound pareidolia (the tendency to perceive familiar patterns in otherwise meaningless input). However, in laboratory tests, such as that conducted by Vokey & Read and some work a student of mine presented at the Western Psychological Association convention this year, little is perceived from very ambiguous sensory information without priming or suggestion. The “Elmo” post includes several illustrations of this.

So, the question remains: Did we see the Enterprise because it really does look like the Enterprise, or we just amazingly geeky?

Either way, I’m going to add it to my collection. If my readers are even HALF as geeky as me…

Vokey JR, & Read JD (1985). Subliminal messages. Between the devil and the media. The American psychologist, 40 (11), 1231-9 PMID: 4083611

Confession: I adore George Takei. This post isn’t about George Takei. It’s about a gig of his.

George Takei is the newest spokesperson for Sharp, selling a product called “Quattron Quad Pixel Technology”. The product claims that the addition of a yellow filter enables the television to display “never-before-seen colors”.

Absurd. There are no “never-before-seen colors” because color, by definition, must be seen to exist. It is not a property of objects or even light, but the perception of light and its properties.

So, let’s assume that they meant what George says in the commercial: that it displays color you can’t see with your TV’s 3-color technology.

Still very difficult to believe. The current RGB system produces more than 16 million colors, many of which are indistinguishable from one another already, so this seems a bit dubious.

I looked around to see what others are saying about it and found very little. A discussion on gagetynews.com caught my eye, though.

In it the author quotes a neuroscientist named Jack Lewis (who is apparently a UK version of Dr. Oz for the brain) as saying,

A key mechanism of perceiving colour involves comparing levels of red versus green light and blue versus yellow light, which all happens in a special layer of neurons within the retina. The addition of the yellow sub-pixel (to the standard red, green and blue) in this product creates so many new colour tones that the new technology Sharp is using to create images is mimicking critical features of the brain’s visual system. This could ultimately make us feel more involved in things we watch on TV, whether it’s playing a video game with your mates, cheering on your team or watching the latest action thriller.

Well, the first sentence is correct. The rest is hogwash.

First, the retina is in the eye not the brain. One would think that would be covered in neuroscientist school.

Second, what evidence is there to support the statement that mimicking features of the brain, or even seeing an image more clearly, makes us feel “more involved in things we watch”?

Let me answer that: none. Absolutely none. What does that even mean, anyway?

http://www.sharpusa.com/ForHome/HomeEntertainment/LCDTVs/WhatIsQuattron.aspx

How it works

The color of each pixel in an LCD monitor is produced by varying the amount of light shined through each of three sub-pixels each with a red, green, or blue filter. The amount of each determines the color the pixel will ultimately display.

The Quattron monitor involves four sub-pixels: red, green, blue, and yellow. Sharp claims that the addition of a yellow sub-pixel allows the production of more colors than the standard RGB system.

Why I think this claim is just silly

Well, let’s start with the initial statement:

At Sharp, our goal is to reproduce every color in the world on TV.

Color is in the mind, not the world.

Color is a perception, not a property of objects or anything else in the environment. “Reproducing colors” really means reproducing combinations of wavelengths and intensities of light, which our brain interprets as differences in color. An explanation of this is below.

Color is not discrete.

There are certainly limits to our ability to detect differences among colors, but color itself is not a discrete variable. Wavelength can be measured by nanometer, but there is a difference between 451 and 451.1 of these nanometers. There is a difference between 451.1 and 451.11 as well. This variable is continuous and our perception of each does not follow an algorithm. The firing of neurons is only somewhat predictable; it is a matter of probabilities, not certainties.

It is also much more complicated than “see color, perceive color”.

For example, we can distinguish among light samples which differ in wavelength by 2 to 6 nm, depending on placement in the spectrum. This difference is called the “Just Noticeable Difference” (JND). However, the JND differs among individuals. In fact, the distribution of hue perception across wavelengths differs among individuals somewhat.

The point here is that there is not a definitive number of colors in the world or even in the mind.

The human visual system will not know the difference

What follows is a very watered-down version of human color vision, but I would be happy to recommend some excellent texts on the topic if you leave a comment here or email me.

Electromagnetic energy spans a spectrum from gamma rays to radio waves and includes a range we humans sense with our eyes. We call that range the visible light spectrum.

When electromagnetic energy with a wavelength in the visual light spectrum enters the human eye, photons are “caught” by sensors at the back of the retina called rods and cones. These receptors are specialized neurons which fire (when photon absorption is sufficient) and send signals to other neurons.

The number of these receptors that fire allow us to determine the intensity of light (how much light there is). Three of the four kinds of receptors allow us to distinguish among wavelengths of light. The probability of firing for each cone depends on wavelength, with one cone most likely to fire if the wavelength is approximately 420nm, another at approximately 530nm, and the third at approximately 565nm. This is, of course, on average.

These cones are sometimes referred to as blue, green, and red cones, respectively, due to the perception each produces, but since the perceptions are not exactly blue, green, and red, most researchers prefer “s” for short wavelength, “m” for medium, and “l” for long. The responses of these three cones result in all of the colors we perceive by mixing in different amounts, much like the three primaries of pigment (red, yellow, and blue) are combined.

So, what about 4-color separation as a printing process? The CYMK printing process mixes ink primaries of cyan, yellow, and magenta in different amounts to produce millions of colors. The “K” in the process refers to black. Instead of mixing the three ink colors, black ink is used. One advantage of this practice is cost efficiency. Thus, the fact that CYMK is considered a 4-color process does not make it comparable to this “Quattron” process.

Why do we see four unique hues?

Layers of neurons in the retina converge to form a set of opponencies. Red and green oppose one another, then the combination of red and green cones converge to produce a yellow opponent for blue. In color matching experiments, participants are given a circle of light at a wavelength perceived as yellow. Then they are given another circle in which wavelengths perceived as red and green may be mixed. When they are mixed in equal parts, the circles appear to match although they are quite different in physical properties.

So, the human visual system cannot distinguish between yellow light and a mixture of green and red light. How, then, are we to tell the difference between a pixel produced by a yellow filter and one produced by a mixture of red and green filters?

Even if we could tell the difference between yellow light and a red/green mixture, the Quattron system mixes the color at the sub-pixel level. The color of the pixel is the same in either case.

So what can the Quattron system do?

Much like the K in CYMK, the Quattron system may be more energy efficient by allowing the use of yellow in the place of equal parts red and green light. Sharp claims:

When combined with Sharp’s 1080p X-Gen LCD panel, which incorporates UV2A Technology, the displays offer dramatic reduction in energy consumption compared with conventional fluorescent-backlight LCD TVs.

With four sub-pixels to mix, more variations in wavelength/intensity mixtures may be produced which, technically, means that more shades are produced. However, if this is the case, the ability of the human visual system to differentiate among them is questionable at best. So, it may be able to display more colors, but does it matter? I think not.

Oirignally Posted February 4, 2009

I just caught a report on our local Fox News station about a couple that appeared on “Good Morning New York”, complaining about Elmo’s potty mouth:

Notice that the segment opens with a statement of FACT — the toy has a dirty message — rather than a question about whether this might be true.

This is a perfect example of how human perception is influenced by knowledge. Perception driven by expectation and belief is called “top-down” processing, whereas perception that starts with information from the senses is considered “bottom-up”. Most of our daily perception is top-down in nature.

In many of my classes, I demonstrate this by playing music clips backwards. Some claim that these clips have “hidden messages”. Everyone from the Beatles to Queen to Eminem to Brittany Spears has been accused of it. An entire website is devoted to the study of what David John Oates calls the greatest discovery of all time: Reverse Speech. He even sells training courses and other products (surprise, surprise).

Oates claims that our unconscious is revealing itself through our speech and that these messages can be heard if we listen to recordings of this speech backwards. He spends countless hours listening to audio recordings of politicians, celebrities, and music — listening for anything that sounds like English and documenting it. Sometimes the audio must be slowed down before one can perceive the message.

His website is the source of many of the clips that I use. Fun classroom demonstrations are the only things of value there. My personal favorite is Neil Armstrong saying, “Man will space walk” as he is walking on the moon!

Click here to listen to Neil Armstrong

Oates says, “This is a reflection of his logical thoughts at the time. Man will continue to walk into space.” However, some have claimed that this is evidence that the moon landing was a hoax; that man will walk in space someday, but he is not at the moment.

If you listen to these clips, you will probably hear it, too. So, what is going on?

The “backmasking” and “subliminal messages” paranoia that began during the early days of the cold war has been the object of many studies, all of which point to one conclusion: we do not perceive these messages unless we are told to listen for them. One of the earliest (and best) of these, by Vokey & Read, is discussed in their article in American Psychologist in 1985. The authors conducted several experiments to fully address the question, but the most interesting is the last they discuss.

They started with a recording of the 23rd Psalm because the backmasking cryers of the time claimed that Satan was the source of the messages and religious material was free of them. In addition, they chose a passage from Jabberwocky because it is meaningless when heard forward. After listening carefully they found pieces that could be interpreted as something meaningful, albeit silly. For example, part of Jabberwocky played backwards sounds something like, “Saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth.” When participants in the study were told the message to listen for, they agreed 85% of the time. However, they did not perceive that message when given a different expectation.

This effect is fairly easy to demonstrate. Try listening to the following clips for anything intelligible:

1. Queen Singing “Another One Bites the Dust”

2. The Beverly Hillbillies Theme Song

3. “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar

It’s no fun if you cheat, so listen several times and write down anything that sounds like it might be a message.

Did you get much?

THEN, click here to read the messages. Finally, listen again. It may take a time or two, but eventually you’ll hear at least some of them. Afterward, you will never perceive the jibberish you heard the first time. Instead, you will only hear the message.

In the Elmo clip, notice that one of the women on the street said, “It sounds a lot clearer this time around.” The newscaster in the studio also said that he did not hear the message, but when he played it again he did. This behavior is exactly what I would expect — and what I do expect when I play these clips for students. They never disappoint me because they are human.

Humans do not like ambiguity. We like to make sense of the world and will do so whenever we can. When told what to expect, we often form perceptions that match that expectation. Our perceptions often persist, even when we know that they were formed in this manner.

And there is the fear factor. And the outrage. And the frustration when people do not agree with you, although you believe it is obvious.

There have been many claims of evil in toyland. You might remember a few years ago, when the Teletubbies were under fire because a talking Po doll seemed to say, “Faggot, Faggot”. So, Po is a bigot even though, according to Reverend Jerry Falwell, his buddy Tinky Winky is gay.

Last year Wal-Mart pulled a doll from their shelves because of a complaint that the Doll said “Islam is the light”. Watch this ominous video about a woman who, after taking the doll away from one child, found the same message in a video game she bought for another child. Notice that the report, a broadcast from Indiana, calls it a “discovery” and does not address the question of intention or reality AT ALL.

Yes, it’s eerie that the doll and game sound the same, however, the source of the baby-talk audio may be the same. Both the doll and the game were designed to mimic a baby speaking little more than jibberish.

So, you can blame Fisher Price. You can call Elmo a pervert and conjure up a conspiracy theory. But the evidence says otherwise.

UPDATE

In December I blogged about this case of Hannah Montana’s secret plan to turn young girls into… well… you decide.