He says that once the photoreceptors in the retina have passed information to the visual cortex, the information continues to be transformed-and scientists don’t yet understand how those series of transformations give rise to perception, or the experience an individual person has of color.Ĭonway is certainly not the first to use technology to track the brain’s response to color. “One way to think about neuroscience is that it’s a study of signal transformations,” writes Soumya Chatterjee, a senior scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science who studies the neurology of color perception, in an email to WIRED. But the mechanics of how the eye and nervous system interact with those light waves, and how a person subjectively perceives color, are two very different things. Photons of light stimulate photoreceptors in the eye, which transform that information into electrical signals that are sent to the retina, which processes those signals and sends them along to the brain’s visual cortex. Each color represents a specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum, though humans can only see the slice of this spectrum known as “visible light.” Of the wavelengths visible to humans, red ones are longer, while blues and violets are shorter. Today, our scientific understanding of color perception is rooted in biology. Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms identified the components of the rainbow and led him to theorize that the three primary colors, from which all other colors are made, are red, yellow, and blue. The ancient Greeks, who famously had no word for the color blue, argued over whether colors were composed of red, black, white, and light (that was Plato’s theory), or whether color was celestial light sent down from the heavens by the gods and that each color was a mixture of white and black or lightness and darkness (that was Aristotle’s). How humans perceive color, and how all those shades are related, is a question scientists and philosophers have been attempting to answer for millennia. “If this is really reflective of something fundamental about how we see and perceive, then shouldn’t there be one color space?” “Why are there so many different color spaces?” he asks. And if he chooses to consult the Commission Internationale de l’Éclarage, an organization that researches and standardizes measurements of light and color, he will find yet another unique map. Anyone who has considered painting a wall is familiar with these arrays: lines of color that transition from bright yellows into greens, blues, purples, and browns.īut if Conway decides to shop around at another paint company like Pantone, that chart, also known as a “color space,” will be organized differently. If Conway is after a specific shade-perhaps the dark, almost-brown color the company has labeled “Mars Violet” or the more merlot-tinted “Quinacridone Violet”-he might scroll through a Holbein chart that organizes the colors by similarity. “They have really nice purples that you can’t get in other paints,” he says. He particularly loves watercolors made by the company Holbein. Bevil Conway, an artist and neuroscience researcher at the National Institutes of Health, is crazy about color.
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