From Tina Hesman Saey at ScienceNews:
Color vision may actually work like a colorized version of a black-and-white movie, a new study suggests.
Cone cells, which sense red, green or blue light, detect white more often than colors, researchers report September 14 in Science Advances. The textbook-rewriting discovery could change scientists’ thinking about how color vision works.
Like a coloring book.
The large number of cells that detect white (and black — the absence of white) create a high-resolution black-and-white picture of a person’s surroundings, picking out edges and fine details. Red- and green-signaling cells fill in low-resolution color information. More.
Maybe that helps explain the craze for adult coloring? Not just that some people have too much time on their hands?
See also: Oldest colour vision cells, 300 million years ago
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