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Okay -- Is The Shoe Pink And White Or Blue And Grey?

Remember #TheDress? Here we go again...
People see different colours because their brain doesn't have enough information to work with.
Nicole Coulthard, Girlsmouth, Facebook
People see different colours because their brain doesn't have enough information to work with.

On Wednesday, Nicole Coulthard posted a photo in Facebook group Girlsmouth of a shoe, captioned:

"[S]o my friend has just sent me this asking what colour the shoe is, I would say pale pink and white, but she insists its pale blue and grey. What do you girls see? Please tell me pink and white!"

Coulthard told Metro that a friend had bought the shoe because her mum had said that the blue colour suited her.

"She texted back saying they are pink mum, but when she looked at the pic she saw blue too," said Nicole. "She sent it to me and I was convinced they are pink, we had a big argument as she said I only said pink because I knew she had bought pink shoes so that's why I decided to put it up on Girlsmouth."

Nicole Coulthard, Girlsmouth, Facebook

That's right, we're doing this again.

Already the office is divided -- I mean, surely the shoe is pink and white. Right?

The viral drama over the image of a shoe is not unlike the 2015 ordeal surrounding a photo of Kim Kardashian's dress, which saw the internet split as to whether it was white and gold, or black and blue.

So why do we see different colours?

In 2015 a neuroscientist from Wellesley College, Bevil Conway, asked 1,400 people what colours they saw when examining the image of the dress.

He found that older people were more likely to see white and gold, while their younger counterparts could more easily see black and blue.

Conway told the New York Times that part of the problem was the images low quality, as the "brain doesn't have enough information to discern it".

"So the brain has to turn to the internal model and say, 'Hey, guru, what do you think is going on out there?'" he continued.

Conway argued that those who saw the dress in lighter colours had an internal model that imagined they were seeing the dress under a blue sky, while those that saw darker colours were imagining the item under more orange, incandescent lighting.

A similar thing might be happening here. But whatever it is, it has people already going at each other's throats about it:

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