Zoom in. What you perceive is an emergent model constructed by your visual system and brain. “Yes. This is one of Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s color-assimilation illusions. The remarkable thing about these images is that if you sample the original artwork, the “red” regions are typically composed only of cyan, black, white, and intermediate shades created by printing or display rendering. Yet many observers see flesh tones, reds, oranges, and browns. The explanation involves several interacting mechanisms: Spatial averaging: Your visual system does not process every pixel independently. At normal viewing distances it integrates over small regions. Opponent-color channels: Human color vision is encoded roughly as red-green, blue-yellow, and luminance channels. Strong cyan stimulation can bias these channels in ways that produce a reddish percept in neighboring regions. Color assimilation: Fine colored textures tend to pull the perceived color of adjacent areas toward complementary hues. Multiscale processing: Different neural circuits analyze the image at different spatial scales. At coarse scales you perceive the illusory color; at fine scales you see only cyan, black, and white. The fact that the red disappears when you zoom in is almost a textbook demonstration that the color is being constructed by higher-level visual processing rather than existing in the local pixels. Kitaoka’s work is particularly interesting because it shows that color perception is not simply a measurement of wavelengths. The brain is actively inferring colors from spatial context. In a sense, the visual system is solving an inverse problem: “What real-world scene most likely produced this pattern of retinal stimulation?” As a physicist, you might appreciate the analogy that the retina supplies the raw data, but the perceived image is more like a reconstructed model than a direct measurement. The “red” is part of that reconstruction. If you’d like, I can also explain the illusion in terms of the retinal ganglion center-surround equations and opponent-process color theory, which gets closer to the actual neuroscience.”