Colors trigger unique brain responses, the subjective nature of our brains and eyes, not to mention different media, is why a famous blue dress experiment took countries by storm.

To try and help determine how different people have the same brain responses to colors, researchers measured color-induced brain responses from one set of participants. Next, they predicted what colors other participants were observing by comparing each individual’s visual cortex brain activity to color-induced responses of the first set of observers. 

The authors found that they could predict the color and brightness of the stimuli observers were viewing by using brain activity comparisons alone. They knew what color someone was seeing based on their brain activity, using only knowledge of color responses from other observers' brains. 


It might be possible to predict what you see.

This study points to distinct neural representations of color that people share, because other work has decoded what color a person was seeing using color responses previously recorded from the same person while this shows that color decoding is possible even when using color responses from other brains.

“We can’t say that one person’s red looks the same as another person’s red. But to see that some sensory aspects of a subjective experience are conserved across people’s brains is new,” says Dr. Michael Bannert from the University of Tübingen Bannert.