Brains Are Neat!

(Sauce)

Of course, you already knew that.

We all remember being a teen, smoking low-quality fatties with our pimply compatriots under the stars, asking impossibly irrelevant questions like 'what if god was a woman?' and 'you think Lincoln got stoned with former slaves?'  And, surely, someone brought up the idea that the red you see isn't the same red they see.

What a ridiculous notion!  We each have human brains, we went through similar development and construction of the basic areas of the brain.  Our respective color-determining cortices are at least similar enough that its a small step to assume our perceptions are likewise the same.  And we all seem to share similar emotional responses to similar colors.  Same wavelengths, same physiology, same reactions - sure, we may not find the answer anytime soon, but we can make some solid presumptions.

Obviously, I'm not the funnest person to have 'What if...' conversations with.  I can admit my faults.

And on the subject of admitting faults: it now seems likely that I was wrong.  My apologies, my young stoner friends.

"That is the question we have all asked since grade school," said Jay Neitz, a color vision scientist at the University of Washington. In the past, most scientists would have answered that people with normal vision probably do all see the same colors. The thinking went that our brains have a default way of processing the light that hits cells in our eyes, and our perceptions of the light's color are tied to universal emotional responses. But recently, the answer has changed.

"I would say recent experiments lead us down a road to the idea that we don't all see the same colors," Neitz said.

Another color vision scientist, Joseph Carroll of the Medical College of Wisconsin, took it one step further: "I think we can say for certain that people don't see the same colors," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

At least I was wrong for exactly the right reason?

Y'see, we aren't necessarily born as Blank Slates, with no preset neural organization.  Tabula non rasa, I like to say.  HA!

Anyway, the brain does undergo some organization and structural development in the womb.  But apparently not color detection.

(Wiki)

So, we have three types of 'cones' in our eyes - really, they're photoreceptors.  One responds well to longer wavelengths, one to shorter, and one somewhere in the middle.  Sometimes a person is missing one kind, leading to some type of color-blindness (not the only cause of the malady, though).

These researchers had some monkeys who inherently have this limitation - they have no "red" cones from the get-go.  The researchers injected a virus carrying a bit of human DNA into the monkey's eyes (wow, that's messed up), which ended up converting some of the green cones to red ones.  Soon the monkeys were able to differentiate red and green.  The plasticity of the brain in the color-detection cortex (V4, if the image up top is any indication) allowed whole new networks to open up to help discern these brand new colors (so cool).

Is their red our red?

Apart from putting me one step closer to Supereyes, these results - while not direct evidence - indicates the likelihood that our color perception is developed later, in an individual fashion.  We all still have similar emotional reactions to colors, because our emotional responses are influenced by a different set of photoreceptors called melanopsin, and this information is sent to a different cortex (You can read more about that, and its evolutionary basis, in the Life's Little Mysteries link above).

There's no default perception for color - whatever your green happens to be developed in your life, not in your mother.  I can't wait to see how much further we can go in our understanding.

Who would have ever thought we could even approach the answer to this question?  How could you not stop in awe and smile at our cleverness?  We've developed techniques with which we can finally begin exploring subjective experiences in an objective manner.  We really made a window, however blurry, into the mind itself.  We've learned more about the brain and the mind in the past 25 years than we did in the 2500 years prior, and our progress is accelerating always.