When you think about something, it is likely that it appears to you in one of three forms: a specific object (for example, a cup or planet), something that you can distinguish when you look at it (for example, a color), or something abstract. something you can't touch (like honesty or love).
Research in neuroscience has shown that each of these perceptions activates different parts of the same area of the brain.
And if a person was born blind, what can he know about color? Does the brain of a blind person perceive the concept of color differently than the brain of a sighted person? A new study has found this out.
The study, co-authored by Harvard University scientist Alfonso Caramazza, was not only intended to determine how blind people think about color; rather, it was intended to clarify the science's fuzzy understanding of how the brain actually processes various types of information.
In previous studies, scientists scanned the brains of people who thought about concrete and abstract concepts. They found that this activated many different parts of the brain. For example, when thinking about abstract words, language centers were activated, and when thinking about specific words, sensory centers. However, most of the hard work went to the left anterior temporal lobe of the brain.
But, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, the world is not only made up of concrete objects that you can touch and abstract concepts that you cannot touch. How about something you can see but can't touch, like "red"?
Scientists have performed brain scans of 14 people who can see and 12 people who are blind from birth. During the procedure, they spoke different words to them. Some of these words refer to specific, everyday objects such as "cup"; some words were abstract, such as "freedom"; and some were concepts that could only be understood visually, such as "rainbow" and "red."
It turned out that in the process of thinking about concrete and abstract concepts in both blind and sighted participants in the experiment, the same areas of the brain were activated. Differences were observed when it came to purely visual concepts. While sighted people "processed" the concept of "red" in the anterior temporal lobe, the blind "processed" it in the dorsolateral temporal lobe - the same part of the brain where they "processed" purely abstract concepts.
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According to Caramazza, the abstractness of something like "red" for the blind is the same as the abstractness of the concept of "virtue" for the sighted, and in both cases this information is based in the part of the brain where knowledge is formed through linguistic processes.
Research shows that people born blind are really good at describing color, to the point that they can even arrange colors in a color wheel in a spectral sequence, with purple next to blue and red next to orange, etc. Only just because blind people understand color as an abstract concept does not mean that they do not really understand it.
They know what red means, just as you know what justice means.