Neural Coloring In: How The Mind Sees Color

fluppy88 writes "Beyond 2000 has a very interesting article about how the mind interprets color. Scientists in Australia have developed a mathematical model for how the brain sees color, and believe their discoveries could eventually be used in bionic vision-type devices to cure color-blindness, among other things."

25 or so years of research

..and 25 or so more to go.

Has anyone seen the clips of that guy who went blind some 30 years or so, and has been taking part in neural experiments for the past 25 years? Last I heard, he can now see outlines of images, kinda like a really bad emboss filter. I wonder if they can hack some code up for his implant to make this guy see. It'd only be fair to get it to work for him as he has devoted years to the cause.

I'm slightly color blind

I first found I was color-blind when my mom brought home some color blindness tests from the library.

There are circles filled with lots of colored dots and you're supposed to be able to see figures in the dots.

I didn't know I had a problem before then, but since it was pointed out to me I notice it sometimes. Broad fields of color are easily distinguishable, but if you make small dots of red and green next to each other with felt tip pens on a sheet of paper, I will have trouble telling them apart.

I can easily tell that they are of different colors and one is red and one is green - but which is which is hard for me, and as I stare at them they switch color.

Resistor color codes - you know Victory Garden Walls - are just unfathomable to me.

On the other hand, I am an artist [geometricvisions.com] when I'm not programming (not much there at the site yet) and I particularly like oil painting; if I paint a lot for some period of time my color perception gets much sharper. If I spend all my time just programming it gets dulled.

Origins of color blindness

If I recall correctly, the origins in color blindness are the result of a quirk in evolution.

Originally all animals who had color sight had four colors sensors, corresponding to red, green, blue, and ultraviolet. (I do not recall the exact bands) You see this to this day in animals like birds, etc.

Mammals went a long period with color sight while also being creatures of the night. This caused some to the sensors to change or be lost. We arrived at having night vision sensors, as well as red and blue, losing the ultraviolet.

Fast Forward to a point where our ancestors went back to being creatures of the daylight. Green was desirable, and this was done by the split of the red sensor into two bands, which gives us the red green confusion. This has the end result of color blindness when the conditions are right. Obviously there is a gradient scale of color blindness.

As a side note, I recall a special series on PBS in the past few years about different aspects of the mind, written by Dr Thomas Szasz (sp?). One of the episodes was about this island in the pacific where a large portion of the population was color blind. This was due to a peculiar history of natural disasters that resulted in alot of inbreeding. The people had very sharp vision, were very sensitive to sunlight, and were totally color blind. They flipped out over sunglasses, adoring them totally.

The effect in sight was described as similar in the time of twilight when you can still see well, but the color has been leeched for your view. Although they make up for color by the attention to textures, shades, and shadows.

Interesting over-all ...

One of the problems of this discussion comes up in the various color model theories. It is educational to compare the common Red-Green-Blue model vs Hue-Saturation-Luminance model. There are other models used as well, well known by graphics art specialists.