By Jan Morovic Have you ever seen a flickering light (like a fluorescent tube) out of the corner of your eye and when you then turned to look directly at it, the flicker was gone? If you have, then you experienced the fact that we, humans, have two different systems of vision coexisting in our…
Tag: color
Do you see what I see?
By Jan Morovic The way we experience the world is a blend of aspects shared with everyone else and others that are unique to us individually. While groups of people mostly agree on whether two colors match or look different, there are certain features of our visual experiences that are more individual than others. An…
The science of color preference
By Ján Morovič What is your favorite color? If I had to guess, I’d say it is blue. Blue isn’t your favorite color? No problem, but do you like blue? Chances are (and this is based on a wealth of experimental data1), you said yes at least to the second question. And even if you…
Color as constructed relationality
By Ján Morovič and Peter Morovič Our visual experiences result from complex relationships among the signals from our eyes’ light-sensitive cells. What we see are relationships among the different parts of our environment, as opposed to those parts individually. For example, the way an apple looks does not depend only on how our eyes respond…
The will to (not) see
By Ján Morovič As we look at the world around us it may seem as if our senses simply represented our environment, as if our experiences were simply a “given”. We have already looked at a number of ways on this blog in which the relationship between visual experiences and the physical properties of our…
Seeing eye to eye
By Ján Morovič Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) is a disease that results in a sudden loss of vision in both eyes, either at the same time or one after the other. It is a genetic mutation transmitted via DNA in human mitochondria, the small cell structures responsible for energy generation. The mutation results in…
Sight, touch and pain
By Ján Morovič The sense of sight has been explored in previous posts from the perspective of how it is tuned to and built on relationships among features of the stimuli it responds to. They have looked at how vision derives from relationships among energies of electromagnetic radiation at different wavelengths, from relationships among different…
Memory color: seeing the present through the past
By Ján Morovič At first, it might seem like viewing the world around us is a unidirectional process, albeit one that is complex and fundamentally derived from how various aspects of the world relate to each other (as has been explored here before). It might seem like a process that starts with electromagnetic radiation of…
What makes images look similar?
By Ján Morovič That relationality is deeply embedded into the very nature of how we see the world around us has already been explored in this blog (in spatial, spectral and lighting terms). However, the focus so far has been on the color of an individual object or surface. If we zoom out and consider…
Color constancy in humans and bees
By Ján Morovič All organisms share the need to identify objects in their environment to access nutrients and avoid danger. While a variety of senses contribute to this task, sight plays a particularly important role. Whether a plant has one color or another allows for judging how ripe it is and whether it will be…
Wonderverse 