This is a little fun thing that I have found to be a little tricky. Read what COLOR it is, not the WORD

 

Blue Black Yellow Green Red Grey

Purple Pink

 

It's easy if you squint your eyes. >.<

Yea, I find it easier if you squint as well, for some reason.

its because when you squint, you can't read the text as well and you go by what color it is since that is what you are looking for.

Ppl with myopia actually see better with squinted eyes, and those with normal eyes aren't affected by squinting. As normal eyes and near-sightedness are more common, I can't think of why squinting makes it harder to see.

I didn't really have much trouble and I didn't squint my eyes. I've seen this a couple times before though, it got me the first time.

It's called the Stroop test. It demonstrates interferance between two different cognitive 'processing channels'.

Dang, got to pink and screwed up. Stupid cognitive centres, looks like they'll be punished ethanol poisoning. Muah hahaha..mmm beer.

Hey guys......check this one.....my 7 year old son got it immediately.........flipping hawk

my 7 year old son got it immediately

 

I think your son is more intelligent than me

I don't get it, what's the answer?

to be completely honest, I dont get what is so difficult about these things :-/ (?)

I don't think it would be difficult if I understood how these puzzles are supposed to work.

Someone said squinting would help, but that just makes things blurry, what am I looking for? Little hint, anyone?

just say the colors of the words in your head, or out loud. I say them out loud (so maybe I sound like a freak, but eh, its a test )

I think the point of this excercise is that it is (for neurologically typical people) suprisingly difficult.

 

It is a a feature of normal (with literacy) consciousness that our brain automatically processes written information and presents us with the abstraction for further processing.

 

the experience of the difficulty of the excercise illustrates how normal people don't get to choose which information "channel" to listen to. It is difficult to switch off the reading centre of the brain which pushes the abstraction of a colour (the wrong one) into your brain. In particular you should experience that the operation of the "reading" channel is faster at processing the "stream" of information. i.e. you are processing the reading of the second and third words while you are still speaking the first.

 

If you are presented with a "stream" of color cards (allowed to see the up coming cards) you arent as quick at saying the colours cf reading them ie you can linguistically deal with a colour "concept" without reference to the sense memory.

 

but if you are flashed words or just colours you just as quick at identifying them.

 

It is a feature of how your brain works (or how most peoples brains work)

 

Some groups of people would have less difficulty with the excercise eg. if english was not their first language or more exotically if they had more direct access to the visual processing areas through an atypical neurological link up. such a person might be unusually conscious of the colour of objects that normal people simply filter out of their consciousness.

 

I'm not convinced that this is even speculatively possible without doing some research into where the "colour" sense is located but I know that letter recognition is closely linked with the (left?) fusiform gyrus. I am aware of autistic people that have direct access to other sensory processing areas that allow them to perform such interference inhibited tasks with ease. Equally there are people with senistasia that can process colour associative tasks that normals can't.

I don`t rem my exact source, but it was a site that google popped up while I was searching for Subliminal Effects, and I`m pretty sure that such "tricks" as the one in the original post are also exploited in some advertisments too.

Oh, I understand, I was most definately overthinking the problem. At first I thought the objective was to somehow get one colour from the eight words.

I don`t rem my exact source, but it was a site that google popped up while I was searching for Subliminal Effects, and I`m pretty sure that such "tricks" as the one in the original post are also exploited in some advertisments too.

A while back, I looked into subliminal messaging. It's actually quite fascination on what our eyes see and how our brains interpret it. I remember something about how long we glance at magazine advertisements and the way our thoughts/interpretations are affected by that quick glance rather than a long look into detail. Im sure plenty of you have seen the girl on the swingset with three legs, in some advertisement for cigarettes or something. When I saw it the first time, I didnt notice it, because I only glanced at it, but as I actually payed more attention to it, I realized the problem. Pretty cool, but a little unnerving that it's being used against us

I can do that really easily. Must have a slightly different brain that most other people!

Colourblindness may decieve you

This is really easy.

Yep. It's not supposed to be difficult. The problem is that the Stroop test has two conditions (congruent and incongruent). The purpose of the test is to show the difference in time it takes to read out the two lists, but only the incongruent condition is presented here.