Different People's Brains Process Colors in the Same Way (nature.com) 43
Researchers at the University of Tubingen have discovered that human brains process colors in remarkably similar ways across different individuals. The team used fMRI scans from 15 participants viewing various colors to train a machine-learning model that could then accurately predict which colors a second group was viewing based solely on their brain activity patterns.
Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study found that specific brain cells in the visual cortex consistently respond more strongly to particular colors across all participants. The discovery challenges long-standing philosophical questions about whether people perceive colors differently.
Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study found that specific brain cells in the visual cortex consistently respond more strongly to particular colors across all participants. The discovery challenges long-standing philosophical questions about whether people perceive colors differently.
of course! (Score:2)
Re: of course! (Score:2)
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Have you heard of the high elves?
No, and that worries me. Maybe I'm the NPC in someone else's brain. That would be very unfortunate.
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Have you heard of the high elves?
No, and that worries me. Maybe I'm the NPC in someone else's brain. That would be very unfortunate.
We're all NPCs. Our entire world is just a side quest for some cosmic level game nerd. "Survive Earth for seventy-five local time years, earn bonus points after 75," is considered elite gamer territory. Newbs crash out at 27 [wikipedia.org]. They think the game is about garnering fame and fortune, not longevity. They failed the side quest.
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seeing and perceiving are very different (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Actually, the rods and cones are IN the retina. They make up one of the many layers of the retina. And the nerve cells, with their synapses, are in front of the light sensitive cells in vertebrates like us, which is often pointed out to people who think some super-intelligence designed things perfectly.
And it's "but I digress."
Cultural variations (Score:3)
It's interesting that even if the brain processes colour the same way, cultures don't. For example, in Japan traffic lights are red, yellow, and blue. Well, they are actually green, but the colour is referred to a blue, because in Japan distinction between blue and green isn't very great. In fact there wasn't even a word for green until the 1950s, and traffic lights predate it.
Depending on when it was written, a random book might refer to the grass as being blue. There are more subtle differences too, like things I would call yellow tend to be referred to as green by Japanese people, so their idea of what green is differs to mine somewhat.
For a while I wondered if it was some genetic thing, a bit like colour blindness, but it's just cultural.
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Re:Cultural variations (Score:4, Interesting)
That's definitely not right, because orange carrots didn't exist in the 16th century. Orange was often considered a shade of red, as in the name robin redbreast.
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Re: Cultural variations (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep digging on the blue / green and you'll find the same general issues apply across cultures based on historical events.
Japan didn't have a reason to prioritize differentiation, they perceive the color the same as you. It's the translation from stimulus to specific categorization that is different.
Xkcd color chart comparison between male / female color names highlights something similar. It's not perception though, it's "importance". I don't care if there's 4 shades of green by name, or 72. Someone else with a keen interest could choose to differentiate in 256 unique names. It doesn't however mean we perceive the color differently.
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I prefer to think of it as language, not culture.
Because honestly, Japan does not call the light 'blue' or 'green'.
Japanese people call the traffic lights "Ao", written as é'ã
We have chosen to translate é'ã (ao) as blue, and to translate ç' (midori) as green. Perhaps a better translation would be "blue-ish green" and to all the relatively new word ç' as jade green.
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It's interesting that even if the brain processes colour the same way
i don't think this (paywalled) experiment establishes this with much accuracy. fmri coarsely measures blood flow in selected areas in the brain in response to stimuli, that might show common patterns but that still doesn't reveal much about perception. i would indeed assume that there are general pathways to process different light wavelenghts but there are surely many other variables determining the actual subjective experience: from the availability and configuration of sensors to the intricacies of neura
Unsurprising (Score:3)
Unsurprised. I've had this conversation multiple times with different people, not surprising since my day job is web development and my hobbies include photography.
With color blindness excepted and probably slightly interesting to compare between, perceptual evidence provides us with color relationships that are obviously very similar in most instances.
There's arguments over color names, but if you look deeper you'll find a long list of consistencies (check out the color blue across diverse cultures; the similarities are fascinating).
(Color nameing groups seem to be structured importance of differentiation; those priorities are different between genders, but provide a perceptual color chart and ask people to sort them and they'll generally come up the same.
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My eyes have had slightly different color perception from at least age 19 or so when I first noticed. My bed had a wooden headboard with sliding doors for storage, all stained brown. One morning when I awakened, I looked at the headboard with one eye, then the other, and noticed the difference. Later, with color darkroom experience, I found that one eye saw about CC 05-10 more green than the other. Decades later, everything began having a warmer color gamut: cataract. Since intraocular lens replacement,
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I can say (Score:2)
people don't process colors the same. Just think about rods and cones. Some people have a cone disabled, they are colorblind. Some people are Tetrachromats (small percentage of population) and have 4 rods, they can see more colors than other people. I suspect that everyone has slightly different rods and are more or less efficient. So while your brain might process the color in the same way, if your sensor is different, you'll never see the colors the same way as other people because you can't detect them i
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Plus, brains don't process colors! They process light waves. Color doesn't exist in the outside world, light waves do. Color is a relation between the world and a brain.
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the frequency of the wave of the photon of light is in fact the color.
Kind of. Heavily inspired by. But color perception is also heavily influenced by context.
Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In particular look at the illustration "The regions marked A and B are the same shade of gray.".
So, same wavelength, but looking like a different color.
Now look at the illustration "A region of the same shade has been drawn connecting A and B."
Your brain kind of "slips" and now they equate.
Color perception is very much a brain thing.
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Brains process colours. Light waves cause stimulation of light sensitive cells in the retina that have three distinct spectral sensitivity profiles. That stimulation is "colours." The fact that you think purple exists, there are primary colours, and something called a "colour wheel" are all artifacts of your brain processing "colours" not wavelengths.
These kinds of studies are often flawed (Score:1)
These kinds of brain studies are common and they suffer from a subtle problem. When you train an ML model on brain activity from 15 people, the classifier works for those 15 people. It usually does not generalize. Train the model on a different set of 15 people and get different results. Yet the researchers make claims that they've found the elusive brain signature for color or whatever they're looking for. This approach reflects a basic misunderstanding of machine learning.
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it's been a meme (Score:3)
...forever that "you may not see blue the way I see blue" in solipsistic ways nobody can ever prove.
This is an interesting test, but confirms that - despite the persistent meme - the logical likelihood (we see colors in basically the same ways) would be strongly selected for in evolution.
"You can eat the blue berries, don't eat the red ones" ...feels like if there was any wiggle-room in "what blue is" and "what red is" that *absolutely* would be a STRONG non-survival trait across thousands of generations.
Re:it's been a meme (Score:4, Interesting)
It's been more than a meme.
As the article points out, it's been a question in philosophy since antiquity. At least 2500 years of discussion, probably more. We have no way to know how different people process what they see without peeking inside the brain and comparing. This is newsworthy as it's the closest we've come to verifying it.
There are still open questions about perception and interpretation in addition to just neural pathways, particularly around those with different sensitivities, but that's at least a start.
Color blindness missing one, two, or three sensitivities, tetrachromats or having a fourth sensitivity, shifted sensitivities that peak at slightly different places for different people, all of them lead to ways the colors could be perceived and interpreted differently by different people. It's a good start at research, but there's a lot more that can be answered.
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"You can eat the blue berries, don't eat the red ones" ...feels like if there was any wiggle-room in "what blue is" and "what red is" that *absolutely* would be a STRONG non-survival trait across thousands of generations.
It wouldn't, because you see another color but use the same word.
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Further research required ... (Score:1)
Researchers at the University of Tubingen have discovered that human brains process colors in remarkably similar ways across different individuals.
since the processing of umlaut characters apparently differs between individuals.
Qualia fans real quiet since this news dropped (Score:1)
Evidence that one's personal, private, internal perception of red may not actually be all that different from that of someone else. They experience red the same way others do. Fascinating!
The dress (Score:3)
Not really (Score:3)
What I see in my left eye differs from my right (Score:2)
We may all process colors the same, but colors that I see looking through my left eye appear to be what I would consider "normal" to me, while colors seen looking through my right eye have a very subtle sepia tone. Nothing striking, but when I look at mostly flat surfaces, alternating between my left and right eyes, I see a very slight, but distinct difference in color.
Took my wife ... (Score:3)
Still trying to figure out what she meant when she said, "Beige. I think I'll paint the ceiling beige."
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Still trying to figure out what she meant when she said, "Beige. I think I'll paint the ceiling beige."
It means she's neither a hooker ("Are you done yet?") nor your mistress ("That's it, you're done?").
I'm not sure I believe it (Score:1)
What about people who see color on four dimensions instead of more common three?