Ok, here’s a fun color matching challenge for you. Without dropping this bad boy into Photoshop, can you determine which palette colors on the right are closest to the cube swatches indicated A,B,C,D and E? (the answer should be a string of 5 numbers.) #colorfun
Great illustration! Since I’ve already tried this I won’t post my answers. But ‘C’ was the most surprising. 
My guesses:
A - 3
B - 5
C - 9
D - 11
E - 5
This one is definitely a contextual challenge! The answers are: 4, 6, 11, 12, 6.
Boy, I need to work on color matching, alright.
About 30 years and I’m still working on it. 
What’s interesting is that my wife, (who is a not a painter but a cake decorator), took the test and chose the same wrong answers that I did, which I think shows the systematic distortion created by those contexts. Yes, C = 11 is the most surprising. Is it the proximity of that orange that’s making the gray (11) appear more blue (9)?
Well let’s think about what we’re looking at in regard to that “blue” square. A number of incredible perceptual mechanisms are in play here that we collectively refer to as perceptual adaptation. It is this ability that allows us to perceive a “red” object as red across a good number of lighting scenarios—even when the wavelength returns from the illuminated object are quite distant from what might otherwise cause colloquial “red.” So, simply speaking, we see the gray square as blue because that is what such a blue square would return in this warmly lit scene: a gray. In other words, mechanisms of perceptual adaptation leads us to see blue because such a blue in this context would return “gray.”
I hope that makes sense!
(PS-this is why there was so much confusion over the blue/black or white/gold dress. Since the illumination scenario for the dress was somewhat ambiguous (unlike the above illustration which clearly has a warm illuminant) people disagreed over the dress color. If someone perceived the illuminant of the dress as warm they saw the dress one way—if it were cool, then another.)
Thanks for your input. Always nice to talk it out.