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I was very intrigued by the notion of color not being an exterior property, but rather something that we internally construct, inevitably in our own different ways. In class, we discussed the ways in which wavelengths and photoreceptors play a role in the interpretation of color, and it was mentioned that color is different across populations. However, I can’t help but wonder what role experience plays in the interpretation of color. It seems to me that perceptions can be influenced by expectations, and that these expectations are direct results of our previous experiences and beliefs. Obviously there is information that is ‘feedforward’ (from the lower to higher regions of the nervous system and brain; photons reach the retina, which then sends information to the primary visual cortex and then gets transferred to a region of the brain which recognizes color, etc), but there is also inevitably information that must go in the other direction, from the ‘top down’.

  This, then, introduces us to the idea that what you see, as well as what you hear or smell, is determined primarily by a framework of experience. This might explain the effectiveness of such methods as placebos and hypnosis. These things more or less allow ‘top down processing’ to overcome and influence ‘feedforward’, essentially recreating our ‘reality’. Recent brain studies of people who have been hypnotized show that it can change what people see, hear, feel, or believe to be true- brain imaging has shown that people were able to ‘see’ colors where there were none. This reinforces the ambiguity of the nature of our ‘reality’, in the sense that what we see and feel can be manipulated, but also raises the question of whether or not there ‘insanity’ is an objective term; if our perceptions can be so easily altered, and if everyone’s perceptions are different simply based on the fact that not everyone’s experiences are the same, then there is no real perceptive norm, and mental illness is simply a deviation rather than a reality.