PAGE 36 The Rule of the Striped Dress By: Dr. Lynn Euzenas Last week the internet was abuzz with just one
question: What color IS that dress?!?! A photo of a striped dress worn by the mother of the bride at a Scottish
wedding had people humming. Some people looked at the dress and saw a white dress with gold stripes, and others saw a blue dress with black stripes. Two people standing right next to each other, the same distance from the photograph, would see the dress differently. Heated arguments arose over the color of the dress in the photo. Neurologists and psycholo- gists, magicians and painters all weighed in on the optical chicanery. Was the illusion the result of variations of blue receptor cones in the retina, or simply the lighting? Was it some Photoshop fun, or some deep seated kind of psychological Rorschach test? Everyone seemed to have an opinion, but no one a definitive answer. Jonathan Mahler, writing in the New York Times, said, “It too hinged on a matter of perception. Only in this case, the polarization wasn’t ideo-
APRIL 2015
logical, or political, or racial. It was physical, based on how our brains were processing visual information. And it was harmless.” Musing a bit more on the internet dress phenom, I realized that perhaps
there is something more to this than meets the eye. And so I’d like to pro- pose The Rule of the Striped Dress. This is The Rule of the Striped Dress: Human beings can stand side
by side and disagree. We can admit together that we each see a totally dif- ferent thing. We can agree or disagree upon what we see. We can have an amusing or even a heated discussion about it. But in the end, we can ac- knowledge that mainly, and most often, we are somewhat colorblind…and that the differences which we so vociferously defend may indeed be simply a matter of perception…and a harmless one, at that. Something to think about. Dr. Euzenas is the Director of Spiritual Care & Bereavement Services at Hospice of the Valleys
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