Associate Professor Ichiro Kuriki of Tohoku University, in collaboration with a research group at RIKEN, revealed that there are nerve cells that respond to neutral colors in the human brain.It was thought that colors are expressed in the human brain as a combination of four colors, red, green, blue, and yellow, but this is a discovery that overturns this.
Color is one of the most important information in the visual sense, and it is greatly involved in the recognition and identification of objects.In the past, it was thought that various colors were recognized by combining four colors in the brain, but it has been pointed out that there are nerve cells that discriminate between these colors in primates. ..On the other hand, such research has not progressed much in humans.
In this study, in order to investigate the existence of these cells, we used MRI to examine changes in brain activity while observing gradually changing colors.If there are only cells corresponding to the four colors, they should respond strongly to only the four colors.However, we were able to measure strong reactions even with these neutral colors.This means that there are cells that directly recognize neutral colors.
This discovery greatly contributes to the elucidation of human visual perception.Furthermore, based on this, the development of displays and projectors that display video information will also provide new design guidelines such as selection of primary colors and color combinations that directly appeal to the human brain.I'm surprised that understanding the mechanism of the human brain will lead to advances in video technology, but I would like to see it as soon as it becomes possible to reproduce images with more realistic colors.
