We’ve previously examined the extreme ends of how the brain perceives color, from Ben Lotto’s remarkable optical illusions to the curious neurological short-circuiting known as synesthesia. But how do “normal” people see “normal” color? Turns out, the answer isn’t as black and white. From the fine folks behind BBC’s excellent Horizon series — who have also pondered the nature of reality, the age-old tension between science and religion, how music works, what time is, and how money came to dominate the world — comes Do You See What I See, a fascinating look at the subjectivity and divergence of how we each see the world and the surprising power colors can have on our mood, cognition, emotion, and entire lives.

The hour-long program explores a number of psychology and neuroscience experiments exploring everything from how the color red suppressed the stress-hormone cortisol to elevated confidence to how blue changes our sense of time to make a minute feel 11 seconds shorter to how language shapes the perception of color in different cultures. (Though it should be noted that, while presented as new, the findings are based on the pioneering work of Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, circa 1969.)

Your eye doesn’t simply see color — your brain creates it by drawing on knowledge of what things should look like.”

The earliest colors we learned — blue and yellow — have hard-wired emotional connections. Our associations with red and green we’ve had to learn.”

For more on the science of color perception, you won’t go wrong with Mark Changizi’s fantastic The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew about Human Vision and the out-of-print but excellent Color Perception: Philosophical, Psychological, Artistic, and Computational Perspectives from Oxford University Press.

HT Boing Boing