- cross-posted to:
- color@lemmy.cafe
- color@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- color@lemmy.cafe
- color@lemmy.ml
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 patterns of brain activity in 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way in the brains of different people.
The researchers found that in most cases they were able to predict which colour was being viewed by a participant in this second group, using the patterns of brain activity they had seen in the first group. They also found that different colours were processed by subtly different areas within the same region of the visual cortex, and that different brain cells responded more strongly to particular colours. These differences were consistent across participants.
The paper on Journal of Neuroscience (sadly not open access): https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2025/08/29/JNEUROSCI.2717-20.2025
My critique is… the researchers are based in Tubingen, Germany, and I assume most of their 15 participants are of European cultural heritage (cannot verify… no open access). I would love to see if they can replicate this in a more multi-cultured setting. Some Asian cultures have rather different verbiage for different colors, and I wonder whether that would bias ppl’s perception.
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And I disagree with their thesis: My blue is not your blue. And I say that because my blue isn’t even my blue - my eyes see different colors: a bright Coca-Cola red in my left eye is a kind of dingy orange in my right.
I’ve always wondered about this. Good to have some evidence.
It’s not really evidence, the question if we perceive the world the same way is deeper and more fundamental to experiencing the world. It’s not a mechanical question that can be answered materially.
Do you like have any scientific background at all? This response is incredibly ignorant.
Oh shut the fuck up, learn how to communicate like an adult and then try to engage people on “science” jesus christ the children on this site.
You want me to respond to the science? Sure. They asked a very narrow testable question, designed an experiment to test it, and came back with positive results based on their hypothesis that “we all see the same colors”.
You just threw out a bunch of nonspecific words calling their study garbage, which frankly shows that you aren’t that scientifically literate.
Now, a study that recorded patterns of brain activity in 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way in the brains of 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 Tubingen and the Max Planck Institute, both in Tubingen, Germany. “Even at a very low level, things are represented similarly across different brains, and that is a fundamentally new discovery.”
Yeah, but not everyone gets the same signal sent to their brain…
It’s not just “normal” or colorblind, everyone has a different ratio of different rods/cones. Which is what signals your brain.
And that’s not even getting into how some languages don’t differentiate between like green/blue, so adults from there are dog shit are telling the two apart, even when they’ve learned a new language and understand to most people there is a difference.
Which is interesting because the average human eye can differentiate about a million colors, and we have far less names for colors than that. So if we invented new names, we’d start “seeing” more colors because our brains aren’t just being lazy about it.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-language-1102
Tldr:
We need to make blurple a real thing.
Which is interesting because the average human eye can differentiate about a million colors, and we have far less names for colors than that.
$ wc -l rgb.txt
788 rgb.txt
$Apparently there are 788 colours.
Burple?
I always thought his was common sense and discussions to the contrary strike me a useless navel gazing.
The amount of pseudoscientific comments in this thread is astounding. I honestly thought lemmy was full of largely scientifically literate people. Its disappointing to see so many people calling this study garbage.
Like what? If the same specific spot and neural circuitry lit up to the same color, then it only makes it more plausible that people experience the same color, but it’s still far from certain.
That’s what the comments said, give or take. How is that a pseudoscientific take?
Because how’d you know the same neural activity (as far as we can measure) correlates to exactly the same experience? It’s “likely” at best, but no more than that.
I mean they probably wanted to eliminate some variables before expanding the experiment
Blues are all the same, but what you see as red is how octarine looks to me. Red’s a real grab bag, blue is the weird one.
The blueness of blue is entirely a subjective experience and no matter how detailed measurements you’re able to take from the brain you still can’t conclude that person A has the same experience of blue than person B. Colors are not real. It’s just how your brain intreprets a wavelenght of light.
The age old question that pops up in the joint circle
…fifteen participants? pfft
To give them credit… neuroscience and scanning ppl’s brain is expensive lol. But yeah, 15 participants and no open access, I have no clue exactly what or how they did this
neuroscience and scanning ppl’s brain is expensive lol.
Only if one is concerned with trivial things like ethics and morality etc.
I thought it was cost of electricity and maintenance of the machines? How much money is compliance for these things?
$1 for electricity, $2 for the tech, $5 for the machine. $.50 for the researcher, and $25000 for the owner of the facility.
Your numbers must be wrong. The average cost of an MRI scan is under 1000 dollars in the States, uninsured. Link
This is for a 4 hour procedure, so the values given for labor are also criminally low. I know machine techs who are well paid and work on less than 35000 machines a year.
The fact you didn’t detect my hyperbole proves my point. Those numbers were in fact completely made up.
If your point is just that people on the Internet aren’t very literate, your point is not interesting. Too much misinfo from ‘hyperbole’, save it for the discord imo. We have AI to automate vibe numbers now.
I’m still skeptical as to whether or not the signals and patterns seen in brain chemistry correspond to the exact same intepretation of the data in your conciousness.
Yah it’s clickbait research, the idea is fundamental to experience, it’s not a mechanical puzzle to solve, it’s literally part of the “hard problem” of consciousness.
So happy to see something in this direction! Commentary is also excellent, looking forward to reading a review of many instances of this study.
it’s still fundamentally unanswerable though, which means it’s effectively both true and not true, because it cannot matter.
Well, I have two eyes. Yep, it’s true. And they both see a different shade of blue.
So, my take is that if my eyes are unable to agree on the same shade, or colour, then it may be amazingly different between people as well.
