do our brains interpret colors differently?

Question

For example. everything I see as Red, looks green to you.

Answer 1

I often wonder this myself, or wether eye colour changes the shade you see something. Some people call pink what i would call red. I guess you can never really know?!

Answer 2

At a high level, not unless you are colour blind.

We define the colour of light by it's frequency in the electro-magnetic spectrum. So when I perceive EM radiation with a wavelength of 530 nm that is, by definition green. Again when you perceive the same light it is, by definition green.

In the eye we are using the same cells to detect this light, so we see the same there, but in the brain there is a lot of pre-processing done. I do not know if this is an identical wiring for everyone, or how much is a adaptive neural net that gets set up as we learn about colour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision

Colour vision is relatively simple. The pre-processing done on shapes, lines and movement is much much more complex and is all done so that the cortex can create a 3D map of what we think is there.

The question of if your 3D map and how it is encoded and stored is the same as mine is a lot more interesting, as much of this is a learned process and so will depend on how the connections in each of our individual neural nets developed.


But what does this have to do with R&S?

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

I have met three people with the red green reversal.

Answer 5

i was going to ask the same thing too... but i think it's not the case.

your red may look green to me but i call it red anyway. we dont have a reference.

Answer 6

I've wondered this for so long, my dad asked me that. I don't think there is any way to prove it? I don't think there has there ever been a successful eye transplant?

Answer 7

I had a policeman tell me that what I think is a yellow light is a pink one.

Answer 8

Everything is kinda gray to me. But who knows gray to me could be blue to you.

Answer 9

well no maybe to a dog or someone colorblind

Answer 10

yes it does.