Artisitc License: Color Vision and Color Theory :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Artisitc License blazon Vision and Color Theory Imagine yourself in an art museum. You wander slowly from cold room to cold room, analyzing swart canvases on stark white walls. When you reach a particular work, do you prefer to stand sand and take everything in at once? Or do you move so close to the painting that the individual brushstrokes become apparent? Several different sensory processes occur in your brain during this self-gratification to the art museum the majority of them involve visual inputs. How does your brain put together all the information that your eyes receive? This raises questions ranging from depth of field to color. The ideas of color cognition and color theory are interesting ones. How do humans account for color and does it truly exist? I think that by examining not sole(prenominal) the neurological on-goings in the brain, still by learning about color through philosophy, and even art, a greater understanding of it can be reached. forrader delving int o the philosophy of color and the questions posed by different pieces of art, the biological basis process of HOW color is seen should be explained. The retina is a neural sheet, containing the photoreceptors called rods and cones that is located at the back of the eye. Between the retina and the optic nerves leading to the brain are a series of cells that create a lateral inhibition network of the light/ night signals from the photoreceptors (1). This throws away a lot of the information generated by the photocells and gives the brain a picture of the edges of light and dark. The contrasts are created, leaving the brain to fill in the rest. Color vision is even more complex. Cones (the light adapted photoreceptor) contain three different photopigments, red, green, and blue, each corresponding to a particular wavelength of light (2). Color is a property of three things the ratio of red/green activation, blue response, and value or lightness (3). The brain utilizes visual inputs to d etermine each of these, thus generating the character color. One of the most important (and most interesting) conclusions of the biology of vision is that color is not technically generated by physical reality. Color appears to be a affable construct, and therefore, everyone views color differently. The rationale one is often given for the color of particular objects is the following light consists of all colors. When light strikes an object in absorbs most of the wavelengths of light, but those that it reflects correspond to the color one sees.