RE: Dream colors... Was: Searching remote servers in your own company

Subject: RE: Dream colors... Was: Searching remote servers in your own company
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
To: "Rick Stone" <rstone75 -at- kc -dot- rr -dot- com>, "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:08:08 -0400

Rick Stone marvels:

> Interesting. How do we really know for sure? I consider this to be
along
> the lines of something I've wondered for years. It revolves around the
> way we perceive color to start with. What you see as Blue, I might
> actually see as Red. But because we both call it Blue, it's Blue, no?
> And neither of us gives it a second thought.
>
> Weird and interesting when you consider the possibilities... Rick :)

>From a techwriting perspective, I don't think it matters. As long as the
external results - what we _call_ red and what we _call_ blue - are
the same, then we are communicating.

Never-minding the brain's processing, we already know that:

a) there are exceptions like color-blindness that have specific causes
and specific traits that we can address if necessary

b) there is a range of sensitivity among people of "normal" or standard
color vision - some people can see deeper into the red or higher into
the blue; others are more discerning among similar shades, etc.

However, from the intriguing-but-not-sure-how-we'll-use-it visual
processing point of view, have you seen some of the recent research on
what actually gets sent to the brain, as opposed to the lovely coherent
picture that we eventually "see"? I saw an article not long ago in
one of the populist science magazines, showing experimentally-derived
sense 'pictures' that the researchers think are the actual component
"layers" of the eventual composite image that we construct. There's one
for edge transitions, another for color, a third for.... well, I'd have
to find the article, but the illustrations were nothing like what we
think we see. Yet, experimentally, they could be presented and would
combine in reproducible ways.

The upshot was that they eye doesn't merely act as a passive
receiver/sensor, but rather does considerable pre-processing on what is
sent down the optic nerves to the brain. The brain accepts a layer of
squiggles, a layer of blobs like a low-res thermal image, a layer of
something else (I forget), and-magic-happens-here, and we perceive an
organized, shaded, upright, properly colored moving picture of the world
in front of our heads, with a central attention focus, but with flagging
for motion around the edges.

That research is having immediate effects on artificial vision
development, but I'm not sure how it could apply to techwhirling. We
kinda have to deal with the commonalities of what's presented on the
page or screen and what (reportedly) is assembled to represent it inside
ordinary people's heads.
Kevin



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Follow-Ups:

References:
Re: Searching remote servers in your own company: From: Gene Kim-Eng
OT: Dream colors... Was: Searching remote servers in your own company: From: Rick Stone

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