Creation Moment 1/30/2021 - You Have SPATIAL MAPS of Color

  .......for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.. Psalm 139:14

UNIVERSAL COLOR TO THE HUMAN EYE......and you come complete with SPATIAL MAPS of the Color Spectrum

 

"Harvard University, arrived in Tahiti in 1959 to study island life, he expected to have a hard time learning the local words for colors. His field had long espoused a theory called linguistic relativity, which held that language shapes perception. Color was the “parade

example,” Kay says. His professors and textbooks taught that people could only recognize a color as categorically distinct from others if they had a word for it. If you knew only three color words, a rainbow would have only three stripes. Blue wouldn’t stand out as blue if you couldn’t name it.

What’s more, according to the relativist view, color categories were arbitrary. The spectrum of color has no intrinsic organization. Scientists had no reason to suspect that cultures divvied it up in similar ways. To an English speaker like Kay, the category “red” might include shades ranging from deep wine to light ruby. But to Tahitians, maybe “red” also included shades that Kay would call “orange” or “purple.” Or maybe Tahitians chunked colors not by a combination of hue, lightness and saturation, as Americans do, but by material qualities, like texture or sheen.

To his surprise, however, Kay found it easy to understand colors in Tahitian. The language had fewer color terms than English. For example, only one word, ninamu, translated to both green and blue (now known as grue). But most Tahitian colors mapped astonishingly well to categories that Kay already knew intuitively, including white, black, red, and yellow. It was strange, he thought, that the groupings weren’t more random.

Almost all of the languages they examined appeared to have color words that drew from the same 11 basic categories.

A few years later, back in Boston, he was shooting the breeze with a

fellow anthropologist, Brent Berlin, who had worked as a graduate student among speakers of the Mayan language Tzeltal, in Chiapas, Mexico. There, Berlin told Kay, he had encountered exactly the same color categories that Kay had observed in Tahiti, including a single word for grue. “The two languages are as unrelated to each other historically as any two languages can be,” Kay says. And yet they seemed to give rise to a common way of seeing and thinking about color.

The results revealed two remarkable patterns, which Kay and Berlin laid out in their 1969 monograph, Basic Color Terms. 

First, almost all of the languages they examined appeared to have color words that drew from the same 11 basic categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. 

Second, cultures seemed to build up their color vocabularies in a predictable way. Languages with only two color categories chunked the spectrum into blacks and whites. Languages with three categories also had a word for red. Green or yellow came next. Then blue. Then brown. And so on.

Kay and Berlin took these commonalities as evidence that our conception of colors is rooted, not in language, but in our shared human biology.

More than a decade later, however, Kay and Berlin’s revelations got some scientists wondering if color categories could be anchored in something more innate. The wellspring, they suspected, lay deep inside the human brain. But where?

Many color categories were consistent across cultures, suggesting a strong biological link.

Our color vision system, it turns out, is terrifically complex. When light hits the human retina, it

activates three classes of photoreceptor cells, called cones. Although all cones can respond to all wavelengths in the visible spectrum, each type is most sensitive to one particular slice: blue, yellow, or yellow-green. The relatively small differences between these peaks allow the brain to do some pretty sophisticated calculations, which determine the colors of the objects we look at.

This code remains something of a mystery, but neuroscientists are beginning to crack it. There is some evidence, for example, that in the visual cortex, an information processing center near the back of the skull, the brain adjusts signals relayed from the cones to account for variations in ambient light, making a banana appear yellow or an apple red whether it’s hanging in broad daylight or perched atop a dimly lit counter.

Our ability to discriminate between “banana yellow” or “apple red,” however, may arise near the bottom of the brain, in the inferior temporal cortex, a region responsible for high-level visual tasks such as recognizing faces, says Bevil Conway, .....he recently found tiny islands of cells in this region that seem to be tuned to specific hues, providing a sort of spatial map of the color spectrum.

That we have separate hardware for differentiating colors and organizing them is telling, says Jules Davidoff, a psychologist at Goldsmiths University of London." PocketWorthy/ChelseaWald