White's illusion is a brightness illusion where certain stripes of a black and white grating is partially replaced by a gray rectangle (Fig. 1). Both of the gray bars of A and B are the same color and opacity. The brightness of the gray pieces appear to shift toward the brightness of the top and bottom bordering stripes. This is interesting because lateral inhibition cannot explain this occurrence. This occurs even when the gray patches in the black stripes are bordered by more white than black (and conversely for the gray patches in the white stripes).
Read more about White's Illusion: Lateral Inhibition, Belongingness, Other Experiments/articles Involving White's Illusion
Famous quotes containing the words white and/or illusion:
“But seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive pansies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow on every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark—
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,
Sleep in oblivion.—The shark
Glides white through the phosphorus sea.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It isn’t safe to sit in judgment upon another person’s illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)