I just finished reading a new science fiction novel by Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker. It is a little edgier or bizarre, than Mistborn, which I enjoyed greatly. Still, Warbreaker is a worthy purchase (less than $10 on Kindle). Sanderson creates a world where the highlands are very drab and have little natural color in the environment. Consequently the kingdom that lives in the environment treats color as unnatural and something to be avoided. In contrast, the lowlands are tropical, and colors abound, especially because of bountiful plants that produce inexpensive dyes. This kingdom treasures color in everything. One of the story threads is the distrust between the two kingdoms simply on whether they like colors in their clothing and everyday life.
Sheesh. How did I get here? Oh, Color Plays Musical Chairs in the Brain explains that the human brain associates color as an attribute to an object. This sounds very familiar to software engineering's object oriented programming. (In this paradigm, data and attributes are connected or stored together. For example, a user window would have size and color linked as attributes to other information necessary to create the window on the computer display.) Also familiar is the chaos that can result if a software object's attribute becomes unlinked from the object. Hackers exploit that kind of error.
It turns out, that unlinking occurs in the brain, too. The brain has two independent perspectives of the visual object coming from either eye. For those not 3-D challenged, the brain processes those two patterns and associates them as the same object. But what happens if the eyes see different colors for that object?
Using polarized light, the researchers were able to have the left eye see green, but the right eye would instead see a red color. That violates the brain's processing algorithm, because in the natural world, an object has only one instantaneous color (unless we are discussing quantum theory, but let's don't). Similar to a computer's divide-by-zero error, the human would see a green object, but there is "disembodied red" in the scene. The brain will erroneously paint other spaces in the field of view red, because it has to associate that 'red' with something in the scene.
Fascinating, isn't it? The Science Daily article explains the research is described in the paper, "Color-Binding Errors During Rivalrous Suppression of Form." Mmm. Seems like that could be exploited in humans, just like machines.
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