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Neurobiology

In the mind's eye of the beholder

Nature volume 395, pages 845–846 (1998)Cite this article

Where is colour — in the world around us or in our minds? Although we view colour as something objective in the world, students of visual perception have known for a long time that to perceive colour we need to make elaborate neural computations. The brain constructs a colour signal to recover, as well as it can, the true reflective properties of a given surface, independent of illumination or the surrounding colours. On page 896 of this issue, Cottaris and De Valois1 report that they have used modern neurophysiological techniques to study how neural circuits in the primary visual cortex (V1) contribute to the mental process of constructing colour in the brain.

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Figure 1: The ‘reverse-correlation’ approach to studying colour processing in cortical neurons used by Cottaris and De Valois1.

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  1. the Center for Neural Science, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Robert Shapley

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  1. Robert Shapley
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Shapley, R. In the mind's eye of the beholder. Nature 395, 845–846 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/27554

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