Anil Seth

There are real things in the world.

But color is something that it takes a brain for color to exist.

Surfaces reflect light in various ways, and the brain keeps track of how surfaces reflect light.

And it creates color as a sort of way for the brain to keep track of these things.

But they don't objectively exist out there in the world in the same way that some things exist, whether there's a mind involved or not.

But other things like colors require a mind.

And this isn't just neuroscience that says this.

The painter Cezanne long ago said that color is the place where the brain and the universe meet.

There are a number of reasons why I think this is important.

The first is just plain curiosity.

I want to understand, and I think a number of people, many people want to understand, what is the relationship between what we experience, what we see, and what's actually going on?

How accurate are our perceptions?

How closely do they track the real world?

And so we need to look under the hood and figure out how perception actually works.

But there are also some more practical reasons why all this is important.

One of them is we can begin to understand, as we were discussing earlier, that different people can have different experiences.

I think this is important.

Even just at a high level to recognize this helps us build empathy, helps us recognize that other people, just as other people can believe different things if they listen to different news channels,

We can't always assume that people see things the same way that we do.

And this goes down very, very deeply, right down to the way we see colors.