/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16131078
>Researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI) have decoded brain maps of human color perception. The findings, published today in Current Biology, open a window into how color processing is organized in the brain, and how the brain recognizes and groups colors in the environment.

>"This is one of the first studies to determine what color a person is seeing based on direct measurements of brain activity," said Bevil Conway, Ph.D., chief of NEI's Unit on Sensation, Cognition and Action, who led the study. "The approach lets us get at fundamental questions of how we perceive, categorize, and understand color."

>The technique provides a direct measurement of brain cell activity using an array of sensors around the head. It reveals the millisecond-by-millisecond changes that happen in the brain to enable vision. The researchers recorded patterns of activity as volunteers viewed specially designed color images and reported the colors they saw.

>The researchers found that study participants had unique patterns of brain activity for each color. With enough data, the researchers could predict from MEG recordings what color a volunteer was looking at – essentially decoding the brain map of color processing, or "mind-reading."

>"The point of the exercise wasn't merely to read the minds of volunteers," Conway said. "People have been wondering about the organization of colors for thousands of years. The physical basis for color-;the rainbow-;is a continuous gradient of hues. But people don't see it that way. They carve the rainbow into categories and arrange the colors as a wheel. We were interested in understanding how the brain makes this happen, how hue interacts with brightness, such as to turn yellow into brown."

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201117/Researchers-decode-brain-maps-of-human-color-perception.aspx