There's not a single red pixel in this photo of strawberries

Christine Wang
Updated

If you're in the mood to trick your brain, we've got just the thing for you.

Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a psychology professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. One look at his Twitter, and it's pretty obvious he has an affinity for making and sharing optical illusions.

One illusion in particular involving a picture of strawberries has recently become a viral sensation, and we are berry confused by it.

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How exactly are these strawberries an optical illusion? No red pixels are in this photo.

They look red! How can that be?

It turns out our brains are the ones to blame. Our brains have been trained to color correct what we see so that objects remain a consistent color regardless of the lighting we are seeing them under. This is called color constancy.

Motherboard spoke to Bevil Conway, a visual perception expert, about this phenomenon. Conway explains that in the photo the strawberries are actually grayscale. One Twitter user came to the same conclusion by isolating the colors found in the strawberries and putting it on a white background.

"Your brain says, 'the light source that I'm viewing these strawberries under has some blue component to it, so I'm going to subtract that automatically from every pixel,'" Conway explained. "And when you take grey pixels and subtract out this blue bias, you end up with red."

In other words, our brain does amazing things 24/7 without us even realizing to help make everything we look at appear normal. Thank you, brain.

If you just can't over this optical illusion, Kitaoka has plenty more available for you to marvel over on his Twitter. Here are some other good ones:

(h/t Motherboard)

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