Reading colours may seem trivial at first glance, but it is not. The so-called Stroop Test is brain jogging in the truest sense of the word. But despite or because of the mental challenge, reading colours is a lot of fun.
Reading colours – what’s behind it
When reading by colour you not only have to concentrate, you are also forced to trick your brain. Our brain is relatively lazy and likes to try the easiest way to solve tasks. You have to counter this with determination in the Stroop test, because otherwise you will fail miserably in the brain jogging.
- The Stroop Test was probably developed around the year 1935 and requires not only the concentrated power of you. When reading colours, the exercises are arranged in such a way that they inevitably lead to so-called mental processing conflicts.
- Commonly, the brain makes a classification almost simultaneously as our eyes read a concept. We associate an apple in a flash with a round shape and a green or red colour. Apples are healthy and taste sweet to sour. We have learned this and stored it in our memory accordingly.
- When we read a term, our brain automatically retrieves the stored additional information. Square and apple are automatically excluded by our brain from the outset. Just as we automatically know that apples grow on trees and not underground.
- However, the Stroop test is designed so that the meaning of the words does not match our stored knowledge. The brain virtually stumbles trying to quickly make a correct classification.
The Stroop Test – a popular option to put applicants to the test
In order to read the colours correctly on the Stroop Test, you or your brain must process conflicting information. Experts call this process interference. A supposedly unambiguous concept is suddenly in context with an atypical meaning and once learned content is questioned.
- When reading the colours, you may therefore not perceive the information in the conventional sense, but in a new, unknown form. To do this, however, you must trick your brain.
- Your brain jogging will only be successful if you manage to suppress the brain’s automatic classification as well as possible or to ignore the information provided. This is not an easy process.
- In short: Reading colours requires a number of skills from you. In addition to a good deal of concentration, you also need to be able to react quickly, for example.
- In addition, it is extremely helpful if you successfully block out all distractions as far as possible while focusing exclusively on the set goal. This is one of the reasons why the Stroop Test is not only used in clinical areas such as neuropsychological function diagnostics, but is also popular for psychological aptitude tests.
Reading colours – how the brain jog works
Reading colours is done at different levels of difficulty. Basically, the Stroop test is about correctly classifying the colour in which the respective word is written in as short a time as possible. In theory, this may read quite easily, but in practice it often looks quite different.
- Reading the colours becomes even more difficult when a colour is mentioned but represented in a different colour. For example, if the term black is written in red. The classification to black happens in a flash, but the correct colour would have been red. On the website Brainfit you have the opportunity to try out how successful you are at reading the colours.
- Alternatively, you create a small Stroop test in Word itself. You create one or more documents on which you display different words in different colours. After you have printed out your Stroop Test, have your “test persons” name the corresponding colours.
