Do We See the Same Colors as Others? Study Suggests Brains Respond to the Same Hues in Similar Ways

Using MRI scans, researchers found that participants’ patterns of brain activity were alike when looking at certain colors. But people can still experience those colors differently

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

September 17, 2025

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Have you ever argued with someone over the color of an object? “No, that shirt is pink, not purple.” Or, “That’s clearly blue, not green.” Well, it turns out that while we may disagree over our personal experience of color, our brains actually share similar responses to certain hues.

To understand how brains perceive color, Michael Bannert and Andreas Bartels, two researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany, conducted MRI scans on participants as they looked at shades of red, green and yellow. Then, they predicted what color another participant was looking at, based on how the person’s brain activity compared to patterns revealed in the first set of scans.

“There are commonalities across brains,” Bartels says to Laura Sanders at Science News. Different colors, the team found, seem to be processed in slightly different areas within the visual cortex, and certain brain cells appear to have a “bias” toward specific colors. These reactions seem to be rather standardized between people. The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience this month.

“The Bartels paper is super cool,” says Bevil Conway, a researcher at the National Eye Institute who was not involved in the study, to Kenneth Chang at the New York Times.

“The work has broad implications, suggesting that evolutionary selective pressures very strongly favor high-fidelity color perception,” he adds. “Which is just a fancy way of saying that from an evolutionary point of view, color is really important.”

Objects themselves don’t technically have color. We see color when certain wavelengths of light reflect off an object and travel into the retinas at the back of our eyes, where photoreceptors transmit signals to the brain through the optic nerve. Our brains then translate that information to interpret color.

This means that just because our brains may light up in the same way, our subjective experience of a color is not necessarily alike. To put it another way, your red may not actually look like my red, even if it activates the same regions in our brains.

“Colors are not just a physical property,” Bartels explains to the New York Times. “Color perception always includes a calculation by the brain about the illumination.” Sometimes, people’s brains make those calculations differently. That was the reason behind the notorious dress debacle of 2015, he explains, when some people saw a striped dress posted on social media as blue and black, while others saw it as white and gold.

Future studies can take a closer look at those subjective differences or examine what evolutionary pressures might have led to the similarities in brain activity, as their cause is still unclear, the authors write in the study.

The study’s suggestion that brain cells are biased to certain colors is “a new finding that I was surprised by,” Jenny Bosten, a color vision scientist at the University of Sussex in England who was not involved with the work, tells Nature’s Katie Kavanagh. It doesn’t quite fit with what researchers had previously thought about how the visual cortex works.

“If [the study] stands the test of time—which there’s no reason why it shouldn’t—it might change how we view color-coding in the cortex,” Bosten adds.

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.