Click here to begin the demonstration.
Take a look at the list of words printed below this paragraph.
There are thirty-two color words printed in different color inks. Try to find a watch with
a second hand and time how long it takes you to read the entire list of words as fast as
you can.
Click here to continue the demonstration.
That was easy, wasn't it? Now time yourself again, but this time
say aloud not the words themselves, but the colors of the ink in which the words
are printed.
Click here to continue the demonstration.
Could you do it without making a mistake? Did you stutter and stammer, hesitate, get
confused? It took you a lot longer to say just the colors, didn't it? This is a version of
the "Stroop effect" that has fascinated psychologists since 1935 when J. R.
Stroop first studied the phenomenon in a learning experiment. Why do you think it is so
easy to say the words and so hard to say the colors?
Whenever one of your five senses detects a stimulus---a stop sign, the voice of a
friend, chocolate ice cream---the resulting sensation is changed into neural (nerve)
signals that are sent to your brain. So when you read a word or identify a color on the
Stroop list, your eyes sense the word or color and transduce the sensation into neural
signals, which are sent via nerves to your brain. After processing the information, your
brain "decides" what you should say and sends a message to your mouth and vocal
cords to produce it.
When you're directed to say the colors rather than the words in the list, confusion
results somewhere within the maze of interconnected brain cells. Why? One plausible
explanation is that your brain is so accustomed to reading words that reading any word, no
matter what its color, is automatic. So when you try to name a color different from the
word it forms, your deeply ingrained reading habit interferes, resulting in confusion in
your brain.