ILLUSION OF MUNKER-WHITE - SKULL

WHAT COLOR SKULLS DO YOU SEE THEM?

The Popular Science site shared this viral challenge in winter 2018... What color do you think those skulls are? Maybe you think the one on the left is purple and the one on the right is orange?

Actually... not at all! Both skulls are red, both of them, yes, both of them.

"The pigments are transformed due to the Munker-White illusion, which changes the perception of two identical shades of colour when placed surrounded by different shades.

No one knows the answer, but it seems that the illusion is probably due to what David Novick, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso, calls the color termination effect. The phenomenon causes the image to deviate from the colour of the surrounding objects. In a black-and-white image, a gray element appears lighter when scratched with white, and darker when scratched with black.

Many neuroscientists believe that the neural signals responsible for the retransmission of pigment information in our visual field are averaged, and a colour somewhere in the middle is created. Here, one skull is covered with blue lines in the foreground and the other with yellow lines. When the original skulls take on the characteristics of the distinct environment, they look like different colours. Make no mistake!