Brain Teaser Photo Divides Internet: Beach or Door?

First we had to deal with the blue or gold dress, then Laurel and Yanny and now it is a photo of a [...]

By Daniel S. Levine

First we had to deal with the blue or gold dress, then Laurel and Yanny and now it is a photo of a door or a beach that took over social media this week. Unlike those brain teasers though, this one has a definitive answer.

It all started on Aug. 24, when a Twitter user named Becky shared a photo that looks like the edge of a blue door with a teal-colored door frame bordering a white wall. However, if you look at the photo sideways, it looks like a beach, with teal water and a cloudless sky.

"Is this a door or a beach??? Hahahaha," Becky wrote.

Becky then launched a Twitter poll to get a more scientific reading of her Twitter audience. More than 245,000 Twitter users voted, and door surprisingly won out.

Becky waited a couple of days, then spoiled the fun. It was really a small section of a beach photo on its side.

Even though Becky confirmed it was a beach, there were still a few people arguing about it. One person even insisted the people in the photo must have been Photoshopped in until someone told him it was a low-resolution photo, so the people looked blocky.

Others had some real fun playing around with the photo. One person even made the photo a door!

Some Twitter users got confused because they could see both a door and a beach in the photo.

As for why the dress looked differently to different people, the explanation was scientific.

According to New York University professor Pascal Wallisch, our perception of color is based on our perception of lighting. Since the photo of "The Dress" was taken with a cell phone, much of the details about the lighting conditions are unknown. So our brains filled in the rest of the information. If your brain assumed the photo was taken in shadowy conditions, you were likely to see it as white and gold, according to Wallisch's research.

Back in May, another brain teaser sparked a debate online. "Yanny or Laurel" was an audio version of "The Dress" debate. It started when vlogger Cloe Feldman posted an audio clip of a computer voice clearly saying "Laurel." She asked fans to vote on what they heard, "Yanny or Laurel."

According to Wired, that debate really started when Katie Hetzel, a Georgia high school student, looked up "laurel" on Vocabulary.com. When she clicked to hear the audio of the word, she swore she heard "Yanny" instead of the word she was looking up. She then noticed that her friends also heard "mixed things." Then, a senior at the school posted the question on Reddit.

The debate caught so much attention that the New York Times even created a tool to change the frequency of the clip so you can hear the word "laurel" morph into "yanny."

Photo credit: Twitter/rebeccareilly__

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