Do you see what I see?

Roses are red, violets are blue - or are they? The colours you see may not
always be the same as the colours someone else sees as we see colour
through our brains, not our eyes. Neuroscientist Beau Lotto explains.

Colour is one of our simplest sensations even jellyfish detect light and they do
not have a brain. And yet to explain lightness, and colour more generally, is to
explain how and why we see what we do.

The first thing to remember is that colour does not actually exist at least not in
any literal sense. Apples and fire engines are not red, the sky and sea are not blue,
and no person is objectively "black" or "white".

What exists is light. Light is real.

The grey tiles on the left look blue, and the grey tiles on the right look yellow
You can measure it, hold it and count it (well sort-of). But colour is not light. Colour
is wholly manufactured by your brain.

How do we know this? Because one light can take on any colour in our mind.

Here's another example. If you look at the cubes to the right, notice the four grey
tiles on the top surface of the left cube and the seven grey tiles on the equivalent
surface of the right cube.
Once you've convinced yourself that these tiles are all physically the same colour
(because they are), look at the next image down.

What's amazing is that now the grey tiles on the left look blue, whereas the same
grey tiles on the right look yellow. The yellow and blue tiles of the two cubes share
the same light, and yet look very different.

Colour memories

Colour is arguably our best creation, one that is created according to our past
experiences.

This is why you see optical illusions, because when looking at an image that is
consistent with your past experience of "real life", your brain behaves as if the
objects in the current images are also real in the same way.

If we are using past experience to make sense of light, how quickly can we learn to
see light differently? It is a matter of seconds. To demonstrate this we had a large
group of people for Horizon try an illusion.

First notice that the two desert scenes have exactly the same colour composition.
The skies are both blueish and the deserts are both yellowish.

However, when you stare at the dot between the red and green squares for 60
seconds, and then look back at the dot between the two desert scenes, the colours
of the two identical scenes will astound you.

The more focused you are in staring at the dot between the green and red squares
the better the subsequent illusion will be.

The desert scenes change colour because your brain incorporated its recent
history of redness on the left and greenness on the right in the second image and
applied it to the desert scenes when you looked at them for the second time at
least for a while.
These two facts raise an intriguing possibility. Maybe colour is more fundamental to
our sense of self than we thought previously. And indeed it is.

Remember, colour has been at the heart of evolution for millions of years.

Think of the relationship between insects and flowers (flowers are not coloured for
our benefit, but for theirs), or of all the different colours of animals and how they
either blend into their environment or, like the peacock, stand out in order to attract
attention.

Think about the colours of the clothes you are wearing and why you are wearing
them. The whole of the fashion, cosmetic and the design industries are predicated
on colour.

Perception-based evolution

What this means is that our simplest perception has shaped who we are. What's
more, and this is amazing indeed, colour, which remember does not exist, has
shaped the physical tapestry of the world itself. It has also been at the heart of
human culture.

It is because of our intimate relationship with colour that people have been
wondering for centuries, whether you see what I see?

The answer will tell us not only a great deal about how the brain works, but also
about who we are as individuals and as a society.

My lab created several unique experiments for a group of 150 people of different
ages, backgrounds, races and sex. Our aim was to see if we all see colour the
same.

What we found really surprised us (though note that our findings are just the
beginning of the answer).

In an experiment testing the relationship between emotions and colour we

discovered that nearly every adult assigned yellow to happiness, blue to sadness
and red to anger (surprise and fear, which are the other two universal emotions,
had no obvious colour). While children showed the same trend, their choices were
far more mixed and variable.

On the other hand nearly everyone (young and old) showed a similar relationship
between colour and sound, where lower notes are thought to be best represented
as dark blue and higher notes as bright yellow.

In other words people seem to have internal mental maps between colour and
other perceptual qualities, such as sound and form. Amazing when these
relationships do not exist in nature.
Colour structures

In another experiment we asked people to put 49 coloured blocks on a surface

area of 49 spaces. They had no other instruction.

The number of possible images that could have been created was 10 raised to the
power of 62 - a huge number.

What's remarkable is that people made patterns that were largely predictable,
because everyone grouped colours together according to similarity. Why?

Because we have an inherent need for structure, and in particular structures that
are familiar, in this case structures that are similar to the mathematics of the
images of nature.

In yet another experiment that really looked at the fundamentals of colour vision,
we asked whether there might be individual differences in simply detecting light.

What we discovered is that not only are women more sensitive than men, but also
women who feel they have a stronger sense of control are significantly better than
those women who feel powerless.

Remarkable really when one remembers that we're just talking about light
detection.

We also examined whether colour can actually alter our sense of a minute.

Our initial observations suggested that a minute takes longer for men than for
women about 11 seconds longer on average.

But a minute took longer for men and women when surrounded by red light, as
compared to blue light.

This effect is likely to be linked to arousal since it is well-known that red and blue
create different states of arousal in men and women alike.

Deluded species?

So we all see the world differently. Indeed, we have no choice about this because
our experiences of the world are necessarily different.

None of us sees the world as it is.

In this sense we are all delusional, what each of us sees is a meaning derived from
our shared and individual histories.
This awareness, possibly more than anything else, provides an irrefutable
argument for celebrating diversity, rather than fear in conformity.

Which is liberating, since knowing this gives you the freedom (and responsibility) to
take ownership of your future perceptions of yourself and others.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14421303

Isabela Rosero Castro