Saturday, January 07, 2006

Language and perceived colors!

` I've always found it interesting how language affects one's perceptions of things....

` For example, according to Richard Ivry and his team at Berkeley, noticing that something is blue rather than green doesn't take as long to register than does noticing that something is two different shades of green.
` However, this only occurs on the right side of the visual field, which corresponds with the left side of the brain. And the left side of the brain is largely where one's capacity for language is located.
` The result was determined by having subjects look at a circle of squares that are all green save for one that is either blue or merely a different shade of green.
` Afterwards, however, the experiment was repeated while the subjects were asked to memorize a series of words, thus occupying the left side of the brain. This time, there was no difference in color perception timing from one side or the other.

` Neato!

` I think I know how to confirm those results for sure: Try the experiment on Japanese people! They use the same word for blue as for green! Then again, they also have more ways to describe colors.... Hm.

` Well, gotta get some sleep!

4 comments:

locomocos said...

i've always thought those optical illusions you get in emails are pretty fun. Especially the ones that after staring at them have some weird zombie pop up out of the screen.....

and when i was little, i really thought that when you moved your pencil up and down really fast it looked like a spaghetti noodle......

okay. off the subject. i don't know why this post reminded me of that!!!!!!

WHEW!!!

Spoony Quine said...

` Actually, this information reminds me of the email where you have to say what color a word is, even though the word itself is the name of another color... Like, if the word 'red' was colored blue, you had to say 'blue' instead of 'red'.
` It's actually easy to just read the words themselves, but to say the color of each word takes longer for your brainwaves to decide on the answer.

Aaron said...

I think that if we used different colored dots to communicate, the results would be reversed.

My favorite optical illusion is the blind spot. Make two dots on a piece of paper about 3 inches apart. Place dots horizontal to the plane of your vision. Close one eye and look at the opposite dot. Move head back and forth until the other dot disappears. Neat.

Spoony Quine said...

` Man, I used to make flippy-books all the time! Those were the neatest! ...Especially since my stick figures were always eaten by ferocius dinosaurs!

` My favorite optical illusion is to stare at something until I have tunnel vision. It's really weird.
` I guess it's not so much an optical illusion, but it is caused by your retinas not having much of a reason to refresh themselves.