Introducing the brain: how we see color (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 06, 2021, 18:48 (1384 days ago) @ David Turell

Do we all see exactly the same shade?:

https://theconversation.com/do-you-see-red-like-i-see-red-151650?utm_medium=email&u...

"Is the red I see the same as the red you see?

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"You’re confronted with an unsettling possibility. Even if we agree on the label, maybe your experience of red is different from mine and – shudder – could it correspond to my experience of green? How would we know?

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"The color statistics of objects are not arbitrary. The parts of scenes that people choose to label (“ball,” “apple,” “tiger”) are not any random color: They are more likely to be warm colors (oranges, yellows, reds), and less likely to be cool colors (blues, greens). This is true even for artificial objects that could have been made any color.

'These observations suggest that your brain can use color to help recognize objects, and might explain universal color naming patterns across languages.

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"This research builds up the idea that color isn’t so critical for telling you what stuff is but rather about its likely meaning. Color doesn’t tell you about the kind of fruit, but rather whether a piece of fruit is probably tasty. And for faces, color is literally a vital sign that helps us identify emotions like anger and embarrassment, as well as sickness, as any parent knows.

"It might be color’s importance for telling us about meaning, especially in social interactions, that makes variability in color experiences between people so disconcerting.

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"With color, we can measure proportions of different wavelengths across the rainbow. But these “spectral power distributions” do not by themselves tell us the color, even though they are the physical basis for color. A given distribution can appear different colors depending on context and assumptions about materials and lighting, as #thedress proved.

"Perhaps color is a “psychobiological” property that emerges from the brain’s response to light. If so, could an objective basis for color be found not in the physics of the world but rather in the human brain’s response?

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we can determine color by measuring what happens in the brain. Our results show that each color is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity. (my bold)

"But are the patterns of brain response similar across people? This is a hard question to answer, because one needs a way of perfectly matching the anatomy of one brain to another, which is really tough to do. For now, we can sidestep the technical challenge by asking a related question. Does my relationship between red and orange resemble your relationship between red and orange?

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"Physiological measurements are unlikely to ever resolve metaphysical questions such as “what is redness?” But the MEG results nonetheless provide some reassurance that color is a fact we can agree on."

Comment: We all use the same brain mechanisms and nonstructural context, but the problem is always the same solipsistic issue: we agree but each individual perception is based on living electrobiological interpretation and likely varies to a degree. Brain research goes only so far.