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mcchen's picture

Color as a construction of the brain

 This week we started talking about color and how the way we perceive colors is all a construction of the brain.  This made me think of the countless number of times I have argued with my friends and family over the certain hue of a particular object.  So an object that I perceived as teal, so more of a blue-green, was just plain green to someone else.  I always thought the way I perceived the color was correct and didn't understand why we all saw colors differently.  Now I understand that our brains all perceive color differently and the "maximum" peaks in our photoreceptors may shift slightly from person to person.  Therefore, my brain may discriminate between more heavily between two colors than someone else's brain.  I know now that the color argument is not worth pursuing because we all have different views of colors and that should be appreciated rather than fought over.  It is interesting that something like color is a construction of the brain just like how opinions and ideas are a construction of the brain and they all vary from person to person. 

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