Do you see what I see?
Lesson 4: Do fish have a favorite color?
June 2012
Do you see red like I see red?
Excerpts from: Margaret Livingstone, “Do you see red like I see red?” Vision and Art: The Biology of
Seeing (2002)
“There are indeed many people for whom the experience of red is quantifiably different from my
experience of red, starting with the kinds of cells in their retinas that are activated. But, because our
brains are built both by genes and experience, we can also say that your experience of red differs from
mine simply on the basis of knowing that our life experiences have been different.”
“A single tone might sound different to a musician than to a telephone operator; single colors might
evoke different subjective impressions depending on previous experiences one had in rooms of that
color or while seeing fluid of that color flow out of painful wounds.”
“Yet, at the most basic physiological level… we know that the same ratios of the same classes of
cones, identifiable by the photopigments they contain, are activated by a given wavelength of light.
Therefore the similarities and differences between your experience of red and mine lie somewhere
between the similarities between the classes of cells activated in our retinas, thalamuses, and visual
cortices, and the memories activated by that color in our frontal lobes.”
Dr. Margaret Livingstone is a visual neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. She uses anatomy,
physiology, and human perception to study vision.