Are You Trapped in Black-and-White Thinking?

Have a look at the picture below and answer this simple question:

Which square is darker – A or B?

(Don’t scroll down and read the text until you’ve answered the question.)

Easy huh?

That’s right – the correct answer is ‘neither’. Squares A and B are exactly the same colour and shade.

Don’t believe me? I must admit I was sceptical myself. Have a look at this next image – which blanks out the rest of the picture, except squares A and B and the edges of the squares next to them:

If you’re still not convinced, you can print out the image and fold or cut the paper so that you can see squares A and B side-by-side.

They say seeing is believing. But after looking at this image many times I’m not so sure.

The first time I saw it, I was convinced the two squares were completely different shades. That’s why I asked Tony Clark – our resident graphics wizard – to create the animations. Now I trust Tony implicitly, but when I saw this I was convinced the squares changed colour in the second frame. So I asked him as tactfully as I could whether he hadn’t messed with the squares. Here’s his reply:

I was the one doing it and still was fooled. The proof was that in Photoshop I used the same exact color to shade out the “A” and “B” – so it really is the same color 🙂

How can an illusion be so powerful that it even fools the person creating it? Because of the way our brains are wired – we’ve evolved to notice differences (such as a movement among motionless trees) and to be highly sensitive to context (such as the shades of adjacent squares). These abilities are so important to survival that it’s almost impossible to override them. Which means the squares still look different even when we ‘logically’ know they are the same.

What Does This Have To Do with Creativity?

This illusion is a striking example of the power of context: depending on the colours next to it, the same shade of grey can look either black or white.

It’s a bit of harmless fun to play with illusions like this, but the implications for creators and innovators can be more serious. Because many an idea has been shot down or slowed down because people couldn’t see its value in the context of the received wisdom and common sense of the time.

Here are a few examples of real-life black-and-white thinking:

This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.
Western Union internal memo

Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.
Drillers whom Edwin Drake tried to engage in his enterprise to make money from drilling for oil

Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction
Pierre Pachet, professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Michael Dell on Apple ten years ago

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
Irving Fisher, professor of economics, Yale University, 1929

DOS addresses only 1 megabyte of RAM because we cannot imagine any applications needing more.
Microsoft, 1980

Windows NT addresses 2 GB of RAM which is more than any application will ever need.
Microsoft, a few years later

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899