Different People's Brains Process Colors in the Same Way (nature.com)
- Reference: 0179129144
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/10/1220207/different-peoples-brains-process-colors-in-the-same-way
- Source link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02901-3
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.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02901-3
seeing and perceiving are very different (Score:2)
it's not surprising that the same colors cause the same neurons to fire, but that is not same as perceiving the color differently. to one person, blue is the sky in the day, to another it's the flavor of blue corn chips. it all depends on experience and how the memory is stored.
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actually the rods and cones are behind the retina - and the synapses behind that - but i diverge
Cultural variations (Score:2)
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
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Orange is just vibrant brown, so I can see a language without a distinct word for orange.
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Like English? English didn't have a word for orange untill... .I want to say the 16th century? Until then, it was often referred to as "carrot colored", though carrots themselves were called all sorts of color, including purple. Eventually, the color was named after the fruit. At least so far as I recall.
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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 .
Re: Cultural variations (Score:3)
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 w
Unsurprising (Score:2)
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 s
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May not be surprising, but it is nice to have proof you were right, right?
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.
These kinds of studies are often flawed (Score:2)
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.
of course! (Score:2)
Since everyone else in the world is just an NPC that exists in my brain, they will perceive color the same way I do...
Re: of course! (Score:2)
Have you heard of the high elves?
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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 [1]crash out at 27 [wikipedia.org]. They think the game is about garnering fame and fortune, not longevity. They failed the side quest.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club
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That would explain celebrities. I always wondered how they got to be famous... 27 club forever!