This Photo is Black and White. Here's the Science That Makes Your Brain See Colour.

This picture is going viral on social media. This is actually a black and white image. Look closely. This image is created by a digital media artist and software developer Oyvind Kolås as a visual experiment.

So what's going on here to make our brains actually interpret this black-and-white picture as if it's full colour image? According to vision scientist Bart Anderson from the University of Sydney, the effect we're seeing is illusion. Only lines have color. But your brain is filling the rest of the colors and interpreting as a color image. This is because, in the brain, color coding receptive fields are quite larger than gray coding fields. Vision scientists refer this color system as 'low-pass'. So depending on the major color present the picture, the entire grid gets averaged. In simple words, our brain compresses visual information when we look at things, giving us an overall impression of what's there if we don't take the time to examine objects closely. In above image, brain is giving you an over-all compressed image information than what is actually real. What we see may not be real. Your brain gives a different reality.

So reality you experience may not be real, it is a perceived reality. That's where science comes in. To show reality as it is, not what you or I feel reality is. And one more thing. I don't call it as illusion, it is imperfection of the brain.