Fact check: Photo of a sneaker does not reveal which side of your brain is more dominant

The claim: An image of a sneaker shows if you are right- or left-brain dominant depending on what colors you see

In February 2015, an image of a dress went viral on social media and started a controversy as some perceived "the dress" to be white and gold, while others saw blue and black. 

A similar color debate has resurfaced in a Feb. 25 Facebook post  of a sneaker where people purportedly see a combination of pink and white on the shoe, or gray and green. Along with the image is the claim that the color you see reveals which side of your brain is more dominant. 

"Right and left brain dominant, if ur right brain is dominant, u will see combination of pink and white color, and if ur left brain is dominant, u will see it in grey and green color. Try with ur loved ones, very interesting," the text above the image reads. 

Other users across Facebook have recently shared the same meme in posts that have been shared hundreds of times. 

CJ Country Radio, one of the pages that shared the claim, said they found the meme on Twitter or somewhere else on the Internet. The owner of the page said it reminded him of the "What color is the dress" meme and he thought it looked like a fun thing to see what color his audience would see in the sneakers.

USA TODAY reached out to the other Facebook users for comment.

The sneaker photo first went viral in 2017, and made the rounds on social media again in 2019 after it was shared by celebrities, including Lizzo and Will Smith, according to People Magazine. 

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The science behind why people see different colors

Experts say the reason people see different colors in the sneaker is because of lighting, background and light receptors, among other factors. 

Ivan Schwab, a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, recently explained to Health that we all have slightly different visual pigments in our eyes. He said the likely explanation is that it is contextual and has to do with what the person is expecting to see when they look at the photo.

In 2019, Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, told Women's Wear Daily that "the human eye can see anywhere between eight to 10 million colors" and that "we all see color differently." 

Pressman noted that objects themselves do not hold color, but rather, color is the reflection of light on surface and no two people see color the same way. Further, phone and computer screens factor in to a person's color perception and sensitivity. 

In 2015, when the image of the dress went viral, Arthur Shapiro, a professor at American University who specializes in visual perception, told USA TODAY that "Individual wavelengths don't have color, it's how our brains interpret the wavelengths that create color." 

A 2017 study in the Journal of Vision that analyzed "the dress" controversy discovered "perceived colors of the dress depend on the assumptions about the illumination."

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Brain dominance 'is a myth'

It is false to claim that the colors you see show if you are left-brain or right-brain dominant. 

In a 2014 article for Discover Magazine, science writer Carl Zimmer wrote "no matter how lateralized the brain can get, the two sides still work together." 

"The pop psychology notion of a left brain and a right brain doesn’t capture their intimate working relationship," Zimmer wrote, adding that the left hemisphere specializes in picking out the sounds that form words while the right hemisphere is more sensitive to the emotional features of language. 

Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica also emphasize that "the idea that there are right-brained and left-brained people is a myth" and recent research by brain imaging technology has not shown evidence of right- or left-brain dominance. 

Robert H. Shmerling, a senior faculty editor at Harvard Health Publishing, wrote in 2017 that there is some truth to the notion that some brain functions reside more on one side of the brain. However, "for more individual personality traits, such as creativity or a tendency toward the rational rather than the intuitive, there has been little or no evidence supporting a residence in one area of the brain." 

Shmerling points to a 2013 study from the University of Utah that examined the brain scans of more than 1,000 people and found that the scans showed activity is similar on both sides of the brain regardless of personality. 

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Our rating: False

The claim that an image of a sneaker reveals if you are right- or left-brain dominant depending on the colors you see is FALSE, based on our research. People see different colors due to lighting, background and assumptions of the image's color. Further, both sides of the brain work together and brain dominance is a myth that has been disproved by research and experts.

Our fact-check sources:

• Heath.com, March 11, "Is This Shoe Pink or Gray—and Can Your Answer Really Tell You Anything About Your Brain?" 
• Women's Wear Daily, Oct. 17, 2019, "Pink and White or Teal and Gray? Expert Weighs in on the Viral Vans Sneaker"
• USA TODAY, Feb. 27, 2015, "The science behind 'the dress'"
• Journal of Vision, February 2017, "The most reasonable explanation of 'the dress': Implicit assumptions about illumination"
• Discover Magazine, Aug. 19, 2014, "Doublethink"
• Britannica, Accessed March 11, "Are There Really Right-Brained and Left-Brained People?"
• Harvard Health Publishing, Aug. 25, 2017, "Right brain/left brain, right?"
• PLOS ONE, Aug. 14, 2013, "An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging"

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Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.