[Tig] Color contrast is 'seen' by the brain early doors

[Rob Lingelbach]

On Sat, September 8, 2007 1:17 pm, timothy norman huber wrote:

> http://www.physorg.com/news108382631.html
>
> This would explain why my initially felt (for 2-3 seconds tops) that
> the Sony SXRD 4k looked better than the 70mm print at Bill Bennett's
> "As good as it gets" night a few months back.   The contrast from
> the
> DI made it snappier and more initially appealing.  This explanation
> seems plausible.

the article goes on to say:

--begin quote from URL above--
""Professor Charles Heywood, who leads Durham’s Psychology
Department, added: “People can distinguish between colours partly
because of the [sic] contrast with its [sic] background.  If someone
has lost that ability through brain damage, it means that they [sic]
might see colours as changing all the time. The colour of clothes,
and indeed everything else we see, would change dramatically,
depending on the colour of light which shines on them.”""
--end quote from URL above--
 [one might wish the professor had had a good editor.]

In perhaps the main point of the article, Dr. Robert Kentridge says
"Colour is a product of our nervous system – it is a ‘pigment’ of
our imagination."

The title of the article is either dyslexic or meant to plug certain
seminal 1960s rock music:  "Color contrast is 'seen' by the brain
early doors"

Jim Houston of this group stated in response to my question "how
fast can the human brain time-slice motion?" (which admittedly is
also questionable grammar) "about 100 ms on average."  That would be
too slow to apply to internal cerebral processes, but might apply to
the interval required to identify, classify, and recall a color; if
so, then your 2-3 seconds is a factor of 20-30x that needed to
identify movement..  though judging and comparing color and contrast
would certainly require some other time-consuming analytical
process.

-- 
Rob Lingelbach  rob at colorist.org
http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html