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Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Color Plays Musical Chairs In The Brain
In class we have mainly been focusing on the structure and anatomy that are needed to see and perceive the world. We’ve discussed photoreceptors and their role in color blindness but to take things a step further, how is color perceived in the brain? I found this interesting article Color Plays Musical Chairs In The Brain that I thought was really interesting. We certainly attribute particular colors to particular objects but this article explains how features of the object (i.e. its shape, color, size, location) are represented in different parts of the brain. The brain then pieces all these features together so that they makes sense to us. The article mentions this as a sort of “neural gluing.” What this study looks at is what happens when color loses the object to which it is linked? It showed is that for the first time, that instead of disappearing along with the lost object, the color latches onto a region of some other object in view proving the idea of neural binding or neural gluing, where the color is connected to the object in an active neural process.