Neuroscientists can predict what colour a person is looking at using a machine-learning tool trained on the brain activity of others.

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.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      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.