Do You See Blue or Green? This Viral Test Plays With Color Perception

upstart writes:

A visual neuroscientist realized he saw green and blue differently to his wife. He designed an interactive site that has received over 1.5m visits:

It started with an argument over a blanket.

"I'm a visual neuroscientist, and my wife, Dr Marisse Masis-Solano, is an ophthalmologist," says Dr Patrick Mineault, designer of the viral web app ismy.blue. "We have this argument about a blanket in our house. I think it's unambiguously green and she thinks it's unambiguously blue."

Mineault, also a programmer, was fiddling with new AI-assisted coding tools, so he designed a simple colour discrimination test.

If you navigate to ismy.blue, you'll see the screen populated with a colour and will be prompted to select whether you think it's green or blue. The shades get more similar until the site tells you where on the spectrum you perceive green and blue in comparison with others who have taken the test.

"I added this feature, which shows you the distribution, and that really clicked with people," says Mineault. "'Do we see the same colours?' is a question philosophers and scientists - everyone really - have asked themselves for thousands of years. People's perceptions are ineffable, and it's interesting to think that we have different views."

Apparently, my blue-green boundary is "bluer" than 78% of others, meaning my green is blue to most people. How can that be true?

Our brains are hard-wired to distinguish colours via retinal cells called cones, according to Julie Harris, professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews, who studies human visual processing. But how do we do more complex things like giving them names or recognising them from memory?

"Higher-level processing in terms of our ability to do things like name colours is much less clear," says Harris, and could involve both cognition and prior experience.

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