A Peek Behind the Colour Matrix

Reality is an illusion, some eastern religious thinkers have been whispering for centuries. Or as the cats from the 1960s used to say, reality is an opinion. They meant that we're not aware or conscious of all of our perceptions but automatically (or robotically) process information in the world around us creating a sort of virtual reality. I thought it was all hippy talk until I began to study the brain in earnest. The brain is fiendishly complex, but its study has helped us find evidence of what these practitioners and mystics have been saying all along: the reality we carry in our heads is a fabrication. Let's take an example from the field of neurobiology.

The clothes we wear on any given day have a particular colour. Let's say, you wear a nice red dress or shirt. As you go about your day, the light around you changes and the wavelengths reflected by your clothes also change. Therefore, your dress or shirt goes through colour variations that can be objectively measured. The same goes for any surface around you. The world is constantly changing colour. The crazy thing is that we don't notice these variations. A red dress or shirt will look the same red throughout the day and night in spite of the changes in light (and the wavelengths reflected off the surface). This is called colour constancy. The colours in the environment remain constant in our awareness in spite of changes in illumination.

To further illustrate, the following image shows a wooden wall with different levels of illumination. It is therefore reflecting different wavelengths and thus creating objective colour variations. In the dark part, the wood has a walnut colour; in the part where the light is shining, the colour is cherry brown. But to me, as I go about my day, the wall looks the same cherry colour. If I turn on the lights, I don't say, "oh my god, the walls have changed colour!" In my mind, the colour is all the same regardless of illumination.

Why is colour constancy useful? According to Brou et al. (1986), if colours were constantly changing in our brains, it would make it difficult to recognize objects whenever there was major change in lighting. In this scenario, colour would be an unreliable variable for us to assess the true nature of a given stimulus in our visual field. We would have difficulty recognizing objects and possibly navigating spaces. So our brains fools us into thinking that a colour is the same in spite of the obvious changes caused by variations in light and wavelengths.

There is much more to this story but to sum up, our visual system is designed in such a way that it allows us to maintain a relatively constant visual environment, as far as colour is concerned. The neurobiological explanation behind this phenomenon has to do with how we perceive reflections and other variables. I won't get into these details because the main point is that our perception of the world around us is not just a matter of conscious choices but also dependent on the physical properties of our nervous system, which renders the world for us in a way that allows us to maintain perceptual stability. It is not hocus pocus, voodoo, or mysticism. In a measurable and scientific way, modern science has provided support for that mantra repeated in ancient philosophy throughout the ages- life is an illusion. Just don't drop a hammer on your toes because it'll still hurt.

Resources

Brou, P., Sciascia, T. R., Linden, L., & Lettvin, J. Y. (1986). The colors of things. Scientific American, 255(3), 84–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0986-84

Wikipedia page on Colour Constancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy

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