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.
Just because basic research doesn’t resolve a question perfectly does not imply that it ‘missed’ the point. I think this is a serious mistake in a lot of people’s understanding of science, and it’s worth sitting on.
Most things we learn are incremental.
This is normal. An experiment is not bad just because it is incremental. We should be looking at every opportunity to chip away at seemingly impossible questions.
And I think the study here is unusually high in information gained and context relevance. This experiment could have given extremely strong evidence that we do see colors differently than each other, because if we have different neurological reactions it would be pretty weird for our qualia to agree (most physicalist descriptions would have consider it proved that we see different colors). If, when we both see blue, our brains light up in very different ways, that would be weird!
So this is a point in favor of shared qualia. It doesn’t resolve the question; that will require several new ideas, breakthroughs in consciousness, and a lot of back-and-forth with philosophy. But it damages any theory that qualia are different because of brains being different, and that’s cool.
It is possible that you’ve defined qualia as explicitly non-physical (and so must posit a bunch of extra stuff for this study to stay irrelevant). This is done in some circles, but is not standard afaict. It comes in as definition (4) here, after several that are consistent with the study and OP’s use.