A new picture has been doing the rounds.

You might recall how back in February this year a debate over one particular dress and its color went viral (I mean global). Was it gold and white or was it really blue? Ok, it wasn’t the debate of the Century; it wasn’t as if the World held its breath while JFK debated the Soviet missile crises; or in more recent time; whether global warming is a fad. But not to take too much away from the dress Kerfuffle, celebrities like Taylor Swift, Ellen DeGeneres, Will Smith's son Jaden and the Kardashians joined in the skirmish.

More recently, a new picture has been doing the rounds. If you look at the picture above and focus on the girl’s eyes for a say 5 or 6 seconds; then look at the empty area to her right; what do you see?

The optical illusion works by using a technique called ‘negative afterimage’. The eye’s photoreceptors identify colors and code them.

We have three color channels, gray-scale, red and green and blue and yellow, which allow us to code color in any environment. When looking at a specific color, the cells in the relating color channel increase in activity. However, after a short while, the activity of these cells decline.

When we direct our gaze at a uniform background; the white box these cells do not return to their resting activity state, instead they go to a much lower state.

It's that decline; the weakening of the yellow code - that codes for the opposite color to become stronger, so you'll see blue. Therefore, in the illusion above, our blue receptor cells decline, which stimulates the opposite hue, yellow. This in turn allows us to see a more natural skin tone and balances out the negative image to reveal the opposite.

The colour of our office space - the impact of colour on our psychology and productivity

I have written extensively on the subject of light and colour elsewhere.  However I wanted to share some thoughts here on colour and its impact on our psychology and productivity.

Light signals from the retina is analysed by retinal ganglion cells, which compare the stimulation of neighbouring cones, and calculate whether the light reaching a patch of cones is more blue, yellow, red or green. These signals travel to the brain where they are divided into several pathways - throughout the cortex. For example, visual signals from the photo-receptors pass to retinal ganglion cells, which code colour information, and then to the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus (hypothalamus, which governs our endocrine system and hormones, and much of our activity) and onwards to the primary visual cortex. The primary visual cortex preserves the spatial relationships of images on the retina. Colour processing, perception building and interpretation is a complex mind function.

It’s also been shown that what defines whether a colour is stimulating or soothing is not the colour but rather its intensity. A strong bright colour will stimulate while a colour with low saturation may help soothe. Research has also shown that each colour affects a different part of us. The four psychological primaries are: red, blue, yellow and green. And they affect the body (red), the mind (blue), the emotions, the ego, and self-confidence (yellow) with balance between the mind, the body, and emotions (green).

And so back to your office….

• If you and your colleague are doing mind-work all day consider painting your office blue; however introduce some yellow or orange where possible.

• For and office of designers wanting to promote creativity, use yellow to stimulate ego and spirit; This may also help increase the level of optimism.

• Productivity of physical work might be improved by red.  It’s said that red might contribute to physical strength and stimulus.

• If you’re in an environment where having a strong sense of balance is most important, green might just be the colour. As well it’s balanced, calming and reassuring.

Colour, like a musical note doesn't actually evoke much of an emotional response until it’s combined with other colours.

Could we be living in the White Queen's kingdom?

Remembering the past is one thing but can we remember the future. That is, can we remember today what might happen to us tomorrow? We know for example that causes precede their effects and our actions are directed towards the future. This is true for what we know of memory. Our perceptions are the effects of external stimuli and causeality in the same way hinders our ability to remember the future.

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that in her land, "memory works both ways." Not only can the Queen remember things from the past, but she also remembers "things that happened the week after next." Alice attempts to argue with the Queen, stating "I'm sure mine only works one way...I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen replies, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

How much better would our lives be if we could live in the White Queen's kingdom, where our memory would work backwards and forewords? For instance, in such a world, you could take an exam and then study for it afterwards to make sure you performed well in the past.

Could we be living in the White Queen's kingdom?

Yoon-Ho Kim, R. et al,  reported in early 1999 an elaboration on a quantum eraser experiment (Quantum Eraser Delayed Choice) involving the concepts considered in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. What was able to be gleaned from this experiment is interrupted by many as evidence for backward causation.

The experiment doesn’t make bedtime reading but goes a little like this: two photons A‘ and B‘ are put into an entangled quantum state. The state or behavior detected in photon A is dependent on the detection of its entangled twin photon B. However, the detection of A‘s behavior occurs some nanoseconds before the detection of photon B. Thus, it would seem that the detection of photon B has a (nonlocal) effect on the behavior of photon A, which is temporally prior to it, and so can potentially be interpreted as a case of backward causation.

At the same time research from a different domian  may be indicating that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.

Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. One such experiment involves recalling a list of given words.

We know that rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall? In one of the studies, college students were given a list of words and after reading the list, were given a surprise recall test to see how many words they remembered.