TED
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2023
19:00 · 3.5M views · Oct 8, 2009
Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.
HN commenters use it as a fun, accessible demonstration that color perception depends on surrounding patterns and that what we see differs from what the eyes register.
3 comments from Hacker News
Color, Color Science, color vision, reproduction, perception, etc. often surprises engineers when they realize how incredibly complex the subject can be. Many years ago I took a course on Color Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I was working in a domain where I realized I had to know more about this subject than I could learn on my own at the time. This has come up many time during my career (even today). I am so glad I took the time to learn more about this from the folks who, quite literally, wrote the books on the subject (Fairchild, etc.). Here's a fun video to watch: this video Another interesting topic to understand: [LINK]
I'm not sure I buy that it means there are more absolute viewable colors there, but rather there are merely different interpretations of the same colors. We do have fairly strong confirmation that our brain doesn't interpret color absolutely but can adjust based on luminescence (see: all examples of shadow illusions) and patterns (see: this video ), perhaps that's what is meant by a "fourth channel"?
The same can be said about our brains too. What we think we see is quite different from what our eyes register (e.g., blind spot, hollow-face, colors on contrast backgrounds, etcc this video