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Showing posts with label yes I know I'm a smartass. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yes I know I'm a smartass. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Trust your senses...

I recently read a cool paper about color perception. memory modulates color appearence (I'm afraid it's closed access, so you won't be able to read the whole paper if you or your university don't have a subscription for Nature Neuroscience, but you can read the abstract and if you ask the authors politely they might send you a copy...)

Since there are some ignorants lurking that actually think we can trust our senses, I thought I'd tell you about it.

In this study they showed a picture of a banana to the participants and asked them to adjust the color on a computer screen to the background grey. They all ended up adjusting the banana to a blueish shade but called it grey. Real grey bananas were considered as slightly yellow.
Unfortunately you can't really reproduce this on a normal screen, but if you make a black and white print of a banana on a grey background and ask another person which color is still in there, they will probably say yellow.

to make a long story short:

We don't see with our eyes but with our brains. Color doesn't exist outside our visual cortex. And we cannot trust our senses



Not even for these quite basic facts of reality. So, if you feel there is a god, you can never be sure that it's not only your brain tricking you...