That blind people know about color

• What do blind people know about the color of

When you think about something, chances are it is presented to you in one of three forms: a specific object (such as a cup or a planet), something that you can distinguish when you look at it (for example, color) or something abstract, what can not be touched (eg, honesty, or love). Research in neuroscience has shown that each of these ways of perceiving activates different parts of the same area of ​​the brain.

And if a man born blind, that he may know about the color? Does the blind person's brain perceives the concept of color differently than the brain of a sighted? A new study has found out that.

The study, one of which the author was a scholar Alfonso Karamatstsa of Harvard University, not only sought to identify how blind people think about the color, rather it was to clarify fuzzy understanding of the science of how the brain actually processes the different types of information.

In previous studies, researchers scanned the brains of people who think about concrete and abstract concepts. They found that while activated many different parts of the brain. For example, when thinking of the abstract words of the language centers were activated, and when thinking of specific words - sensory centers. However, most of the hard work went to the left anterior temporal lobe. But, as mentioned earlier in this article, the world does not consist only of the specific items that you can touch, and abstract concepts that you can not touch it. How about the fact that you can see but can not touch, such as "red"?

Do you see the same thing I am?

Scientists have conducted brain scans of 14 sighted and 12 blind people from birth. During the procedure, they say they are different words. Some of these words are called specific, everyday items like "cup"; some words were abstract, such as "freedom"; and some were concepts that could be understood only visually, such as "Rainbow" and "red".

It turned out that in the process of reflection on the concrete and abstract concepts like the blind and sighted participants in the experiment were activated the same brain regions. Differences were observed when it was a purely visual terms. While sighted people "treated" the concept of "red" in the anterior temporal lobe, blind "treated" him in the dorsolateral temporal lobe - the same part of the brain, where they are "treated" purely abstract concepts. According Karamatstsa, abstraction of something like "red" for the blind - it's the same thing, that the abstract concept of "virtue" to the sighted, and in both cases the information is based in that part of the brain where the knowledge is created through the linguistic processes.

Studies show that people born blind, really good at describing the color, to the point that they can even arrange the colors in the color wheel in the spectral sequence, where purple is located next to the blue and the red next to the orange, and so on. D. Only because blind people understand color as an abstract concept, it does not mean that they do not really understand it.

They know what it means "red" in the same way as you know, means "justice."