Is the colour you see the same as what I see? It’s a question that has puzzled both philosophers and neuroscientists for decades, but has proved notoriously difficult to answer.
Now, a study that recorded the brain activity of 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way across different people. The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience on 8 September1.
“Now we know that when you see red or green or whatever colour, that it activates your brain very similarly to my brain,” says study co-author Andreas Bartels, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Even at a very low level, things are represented similarly across different brains, and that is a fundamentally new discovery.”
[…]
The pair used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare activity in the brains of a group of people while they viewed different colours.
Source: My blue is your blue: different people’s brains process colours in the same way
They could then predict what colour people were seeing based on the scans.
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft