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.
Every colour you “see” is an interpretation of incoming light data to the eyes transformed into nerve signals to the brain. Each person has a different set of eyes and nerves, so it is likely that each person interprets (“sees”) colour differently.
TLDR: colours are a pigment of the imagination
It gets much more complicated when we understand that there is no such thing as color. Color is created by the brain.
The only thing that really exists are photons with different energy levels, there’s no such thing as color really.
What the human is absorbing is the energy level of the photons, and it’s being perceived as color.
pun is great, but the point of the article is that the first bit seems to be wrong. You can use brain firing patterns in one person to predict which color another person is seeing afaict. In other words, we’re using the same nerve circuitry in extremely similar ways.