How does our brain know a colour?
So we know how our brain recognizes a color. But how does he know that color? Do we see the color when we are conscious the same way our brain 'sees' the color? Is it exactely the same thing, or is our conscience showing us something else? If so, then how does our brain do that?
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hey raulinhovic. I'm not sure if I fully understand your question but I'll give it a shot. Do you mean do we see what our brain is seeing when conscious, the brain itself being unconscious? Because colour doesn't really occur to us until we're conscious. The optic nerve can fire as many signals as it wants from the eye but its only until we're conscious that higher brain functions can interpret these signals and we determine that these signals mean colour. We could interpret any signal as colour really! Colour is just a function of the brain that utilisation of proves beneficial. Have you ever heard that when people listen to music or sounds they can see colour? Also, bats that use ultrasound to 'see', its thought that they may interpret these sounds as a sort of colour. So the brain is seeing colour really, colour in the sense that its a signal from our eyes, and our eyes detect colour. But colour doesn't really happen till we interpret these signals when we're conscious as colour. Colour is the result of higher brain function or at least mixed brain function of interacting areas. Your question ultimately goes back to what is consciousness. Conciousness is really just neurons talking to each other so at what level do we become conscious? At what level do we start to sense or create "colour"?
Noone really knows the answer to that question.
The color you "see" is the spectrum (color type) of light that is reflected off of an object you are looking at. These colors are picked up by structures called "cones" in the back of your eye, called the retina, and they travel to the back of your brain, called the posterior lobe, through two nerves called the optic nerves. The exact mechanics of translating light to information in your brain are not very well understood, but how you recognize a color is. Your posterior lobe connects with your frontal lobe (the part of the brain you "think" with) to connect the color to your memories of color. It will spur you to remember that you learned in school that this spectrum of light reflected off this object is blue, while this one reflects a different spectrum is red. And thus you can identify what colors you are observing. Hope that's not too confusing!
The brain knows a color based on the three types of receptor cones in the eye. These detect red, green and blue light. Then the brain makes sense of it.
The eyes have colour sensitive detectors - a bit like (but not excatly) the opposite of the old colour TV dots - excitable to specific wavelengths - thus when blue light strikes the colour sensitive cells they send more blue focused signals to the optic nerve and brain - red sensitive cells get excited as more red light goes into the eye.
People who are colour blind have overlapping and poor wavelength dicriminiation - I have blue / green and pink / red dificulties - can't see minor differences. Some have it way worse see green as orange etc.
OMG - I'm so glad you asked that because I've always wondered the same thing! Maybe what I call blue, you call blue but it looks more like orange or something... Wow! Get outta my brain! and unless you can actually "see" through another person's eyes you'll never know the answer... but since we create our own reality, who's to say we create the same colors to match the same descriptions.
We have special cones and components in our eyes that decipher colors and our brains just simply recieve the data.These rods and cones percieve information and categorize them in colors etc.
We only recognize a color by what we are taught as children.
We associate better with words better than colours. Don't know if you've tried one of those quizes where you have to say the colour even though the word is a different colour e.g Red (even though it's black).
We are TAUGHT which colour is which when we are young therefore it is Memory that dictates it, not the brain recognising it.
Because you've been taught. If your parents continually told you yellow things were blue, and so forth, you would call yellow things blue.