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  • Science Illustrated

    Your life is a hallucination

    Sep 30, 2020 5 minutes

    DECEIT

    DETECTION

    Take a moment to have a look at the dress on the page opposite. What colour is the dress? You may recognise the photo, as in 2015 it was seen by millions of people online, dividing the observers into two groups. Around two-thirds insisted that the dress was white with gold stripes, while a third believed that it was blue with black stripes. The owner of the dress revealed that the minority was correct. So how could so many people mistake blue for white – two colours that are not remotely alike?

    The dress picture made several scientists wonder what was going on in the brains of all these dress observers, and their experiments now support a theory known as ‘predictive coding’. And the theory indicates that our senses simply can’t be trusted. According

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