Exhibit 01 · Wing of Perception
The word says RED. The ink says blue. Your brain is about to fight itself in public.
well-replicated since 1935 · one of the most reproduced effects in psychology
Name the ink colour — ignore the word
Reading is automatic — after years of practice you cannot look at a word without reading it. When the word and the ink colour disagree, two processes race for the same mouth. The practiced one (reading) is faster but wrong; the deliberate one (colour-naming) must be pushed through by attention. The delay and the errors are the cost of that fight, and they show up in nearly everyone, nearly every time — John Ridley Stroop first measured it in 1935, and the effect has replicated across thousands of studies, languages, and laboratories since.
You cannot train it away in an afternoon. You can only watch it happen — which is what you just did.