Originally published October 27 2005
Research suggests the brain controls color perception
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Researchers at the University of Rochester believe that the variations in human retinas, particularly the number of cones sensitive to color, prove that color perception is largely determined in the brain, not the eye.
"We were able to precisely image and count the color-receptive cones in a living human eye for the first time, and we were astonished at the results," says David Williams, Allyn Professor of Medical Optics and director of the Center for Visual Science.
Williams and his research team, led by postdoctoral student Heidi Hofer, now an assistant professor at the University of Houston, used a laser-based system developed by Williams that maps out the topography of the inner eye in exquisite detail.
The technology, known as adaptive optics, was originally used by astronomers in telescopes to compensate for the blurring of starlight caused by the atmosphere.
Williams turned the technique from the heavens back toward the eye to compensate for common aberrations.
This means that looking at the retina from a cadaver yields almost no information on the arrangement of their cones, and there is certainly no ability to test for color perception.
Likewise, the amino acids that make up two of the three different-colored cones are so similar that there are no stains that can bind to some and not others, a process often used by researchers to differentiate cell types under a microscope.
The discrepancy was more than a 40:1 ratio, yet all the volunteers were apparently seeing the same color yellow.
"That points to some kind of normalization or auto-calibration mechanism---some kind of circuit in the brain that balances the colors for you no matter what the hardware is."
While wearing the contacts, people tended to eventually feel as if they were not wearing the contacts, just as people who wear colored sunglasses tend to see colors "correctly" after a few minutes with the sunglasses.
Even when not wearing the contacts, they all began to select a pure yellow that was a different wavelength than they had before wearing the contacts.
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