GabyA team of scientists from the University of California shared an image of a square painted in a new color. color Scientists emphasized that it can only be seen as a result of stimulating the retina with laser pulses.
According to researchers, the laser takes color perception beyond natural boundaries.
What did the scientists and participants of the study report?
Five volunteers who participated in the experiment assured that they saw a new color called “olo.” They described it as “a blue-green of unprecedented saturation,” but added that this description does not fully capture the depth of their impressions.
Professor Ren Eng, co-author and participant in the study, said: “From the beginning, we anticipated that this would be an unprecedented color signal, but we didn’t know how the brain would respond to it. It was incredible, extraordinarily rich.”
Austin Rurda, an expert in vision in the research team, added: “It is impossible to convey this color in an article or on a monitor.”
However, not everyone shares the team’s optimism regarding this discovery, the publication reported. Daily Mail For example, Professor John Barbour, a vision expert at St. George’s Hospital in London, believes that this discovery has, so to speak, “limited value.”
“This is not a new color. It is a more saturated shade of green that can only be perceived by a subject with a normal red-green chromatic mechanism when the only input signal comes from M-cones,” he noted skeptically.
What were the conclusions of the team based on?
The thing is, people perceive colors when light It falls on sensitive cells in the retina called cones. There are three types: sensitive to long (L), medium (M), and short (S) wavelengths of light.
Natural light is a mixture of waves of different lengths that activate the cones. Red light typically stimulates L cones, while blue light stimulates S cones. However, no natural light stimulates M cones, as they are located in the middle of the retina.
During the study, the researchers stimulated only the M cones. Thus, a “color signal that never occurs under natural vision” was sent to the brain, the scientists wrote in a report for the journal Science Advances.
As a result, the participants saw a spot colored in the hue of “olo,” which, according to the team, “does not exist in nature.”
