The amount of pretentious BS pseudoscience replies in this thread is too damn high. This is quite an amazing study.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
169 points (94.2% liked)
science
21448 readers
421 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
169
Yeah people saying it's BS because it has a catchy title is pure anti science doomerism
I'm still skeptical as to whether or not the signals and patterns seen in brain chemistry correspond to the exact same intepretation of the data in your conciousness.
Yah it's clickbait research, the idea is fundamental to experience, it's not a mechanical puzzle to solve, it's literally part of the "hard problem" of consciousness.
...fifteen participants? pfft
To give them credit... neuroscience and scanning ppl's brain is expensive lol. But yeah, 15 participants and no open access, I have no clue exactly what or how they did this
neuroscience and scanning ppl's brain is expensive lol.
Only if one is concerned with trivial things like ethics and morality etc.
I thought it was cost of electricity and maintenance of the machines? How much money is compliance for these things?
$1 for electricity, $2 for the tech, $5 for the machine. $.50 for the researcher, and $25000 for the owner of the facility.
Your numbers must be wrong. The average cost of an MRI scan is under 1000 dollars in the States, uninsured. Link
This is for a 4 hour procedure, so the values given for labor are also criminally low. I know machine techs who are well paid and work on less than 35000 machines a year.
Participants 120 We analyzed fMRI data from N = 15 (2 male, 13 female) participants aged between 22 and 35 121 years (mean: 25.5) who took part in a previously published fMRI study about color vision 122 (Bannert & Bartels, 2018). The participants were the subset from the prior study for whom the 123 cortical retinotopic representations of the visual field were measured along both the polar and 124 the eccentricity axis of the visual field. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal visual 125 acuity and were tested for normal color vision using Ishihara color plates (Ishihara, 2011). Each 126 participant gave written informed consent before the first study session. The experiment was 127 approved by the local ethics committee of the Tübingen University Hospital.
Ignore the numbers 120-127, those are line numbers.
Doesn't say. To be fair, you normally aren't allowed to collect biographical data or any additional identifying data without a specific purpose tied directly to your research question. If they wanted to answer your question they would have to redo the study under a different IRB application. Interesting question, but I would guess you wouldn't see a difference in an fmri. The voxel sizes for functional are normally 2mm while what you are eluding to is the difference of a few thousand neurons wired a little differently. That difference would be extremely difficult to detect with 2mm voxels. Even at 1mm it would be difficult. When it comes to brain structures there really aren't significant different between races or cultures more than the variance that already exists between people.
That checks out, thanks for pointing this out. I'm much more familiar with clinical trials where ppl's race/ethnicity do play an importance (and is also a hot topic for debate... from both sides of the political spectrum), hence I was a bit surprised they didn't include it. If there really is no significant cultural differences that would be amazing
Also one can dream they get 120+ participants for scanning
N=15 is a normal size on FMRI studies. It is about the smallest size you can have and still make your significance cut offs while still detecting decently small effects. The time and cost is so much higher than other studies. Some of the bigger FMRI studies start to reach 30-40 ppl. Getting into clinical trial sizes of subjects is unheard of.
The other thing with FMRI studies that most everyone doesn't understand is that they aren't actually looking at activity. They are looking at the BOLD response (blood oxygen level dependance) and that is then correlated to activity. Meaning You can only see blood oxygen uptake. You are not seeing neuron firing, just the metabolic side effect of oxygen use after increased neuron use. This is why you will never be able to see something like a "thought process". You can only track structures/locations used.
At the same time we know that no two brains are wired the same even for the smallest of tasks, but they will "structure" their wiring the same. There have been literally hundreds of studies that indirectly see that. Soeach other. Plot out cultural differences versus individual differences would be basically two variance plots on top of eachother.
Now, a study that recorded patterns of brain activity in 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way in the brains of different people. The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience on 8 September1.
"Now we know that when you see red or green or whatever colour, that it activates your brain very similarly to my brain,” says study co-author Andreas Bartels, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Tubingen and the Max Planck Institute, both in Tubingen, Germany. “Even at a very low level, things are represented similarly across different brains, and that is a fundamentally new discovery.”
Yeah, but not everyone gets the same signal sent to their brain...
It's not just "normal" or colorblind, everyone has a different ratio of different rods/cones. Which is what signals your brain.
And that's not even getting into how some languages don't differentiate between like green/blue, so adults from there are dog shit are telling the two apart, even when they've learned a new language and understand to most people there is a difference.
Which is interesting because the average human eye can differentiate about a million colors, and we have far less names for colors than that. So if we invented new names, we'd start "seeing" more colors because our brains aren't just being lazy about it.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-language-1102
Tldr:
We need to make blurple a real thing.
Which is interesting because the average human eye can differentiate about a million colors, and we have far less names for colors than that.
$ wc -l rgb.txt
788 rgb.txt
$
Apparently there are 788 colours.
The blueness of blue is entirely a subjective experience and no matter how detailed measurements you're able to take from the brain you still can't conclude that person A has the same experience of blue than person B. Colors are not real. It's just how your brain intreprets a wavelenght of light.
The amount of pseudoscientific comments in this thread is astounding. I honestly thought lemmy was full of largely scientifically literate people. Its disappointing to see so many people calling this study garbage.
Every colour you “see” is an interpretation of incoming light data to the eyes transformed into nerve signals to the brain. Each person has a different set of eyes and nerves, so it is likely that each person interprets (“sees”) colour differently.
TLDR: colours are a pigment of the imagination
pun is great, but the point of the article is that the first bit seems to be wrong. You can use brain firing patterns in one person to predict which color another person is seeing afaict. In other words, we're using the same nerve circuitry in extremely similar ways.
It gets much more complicated when we understand that there is no such thing as color. Color is created by the brain.
The only thing that really exists are photons with different energy levels, there's no such thing as color really.
What the human is absorbing is the energy level of the photons, and it's being perceived as color.
Fun site related to the discussion
Granted, there's also issues of screen quality/accuracy
So happy to see something in this direction! Commentary is also excellent, looking forward to reading a review of many instances of this study.
I mean they probably wanted to eliminate some variables before expanding the experiment
I've always wondered about this. Good to have some evidence.
It's not really evidence, the question if we perceive the world the same way is deeper and more fundamental to experiencing the world. It's not a mechanical question that can be answered materially.
Do you like have any scientific background at all? This response is incredibly ignorant.
Oh shut the fuck up, learn how to communicate like an adult and then try to engage people on "science" jesus christ the children on this site.
You want me to respond to the science? Sure. They asked a very narrow testable question, designed an experiment to test it, and came back with positive results based on their hypothesis that "we all see the same colors".
You just threw out a bunch of nonspecific words calling their study garbage, which frankly shows that you aren't that scientifically literate.
Blues are all the same, but what you see as red is how octarine looks to me. Red's a real grab bag, blue is the weird one.
I have extensive personal experience indicating that I do not align with this claim.
"Pink"/"purple" and "blue"/"green" just do not work for me the way they do for anybody else it seems, it's been nearly five decades and, despite effort, I am barely better than chance when one of my kids something up and says "what color?"
Have you taken a colorblindness test?
Yes.
Not rated as color blind, but some of them were pretty fucking subtle.
You might look into getting checked for cone-rod dystrophy. Seeing colors differently than my wife, but still passing a color blindness test is what led to the extra testing that led to my diagnosis.
Huh cool. Were you able to make changes to align better with others after the diagnosis, or is it just a relief to know?
There's no change or cure. My color vision is going to slowly disappear, then I'll slowly go blind. The timeline on that is anywhere from like a few months to 50 years, depending on which gene is causing it (I haven't done that test yet). The fact that there hasn't been a major change yet is a good sign though.
Good news is there's a bunch of trials for drugs that can slow or stop it going on right now, and my opthalmologist happens to have a lot of experience with it.
Best of luck! I'll keep my fingers crossed, I've been like this my whole life and I'm not noticing any degeneration. I'll also bring it up at my next doctor's appointment and see what he thinks.
Like blue and green look the same to you?
I always thought his was common sense and discussions to the contrary strike me a useless navel gazing.