The picture above shows a Munker-White optical illusion. The multi-colored stripes in the picture create the illusion that the hearts have 3 different shades. However, they are all the same color: yellow.

There is a complex connection between the wavelengths of light in the visual spectrum and human perception of color. Simply put, color is the sensation that a person receives when light rays hit the retina. It’s a subjective psychological phenomenon. The perception of color is highly dependent on the context in which the perceived object is presented. Research has shown that we perceive colors differently depending on gender, national origin, ethnicity, geographic location, and the language we speak. In other words, there is nothing objective about colors.

Due to the fact that the number of photoreceptors in the human retina is not constant, our brain must be able to automatically regulate the incoming data from the retina. Thus, individual variation in color perception can’t be solely a matter of the nature and number of cones (or photoreceptors) in the retina. It can also be a result of the fact that people with different numbers of cones calibrate the input from the retina differently.

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