Anya Hurlbert on seeing colour

The Life Scientific

As a professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University, Anya Hurlbert is one of our most respected researchers into the way we see colour. In a career as a physicist, physiologist, neuroscientist and physician at some of the great research institutes on both sides of the Atlantic, Anya’s investigations into how we perceive the colour of objects has transformed our view of how our predominantly visual brains function. She explains how the multidisciplinary approach to research in vision from physics to psychology, and encounters with some leading Nobel Prize winners, has fostered a love of the slippery nature of colour. When, a few years ago, an online image of a blue and black striped dress spun virally out of control, it divided us all. Half of us were adamant the dress was white and gold, and the other half convinced it was blue and black, and it caused us all to question the objective way we think we see the world as it really is. Colour is, Anya argues, made in the mind, not just out there in the world and we don’t always see it in the same way.

And as she reveals to Jim, with recent technological advances in LED lighting, she’s turned her attention to the nature of light itself, and how by controlling its components, it could have a profound influence on both our state of mind and the appreciation of our rich world of colour.

Producer Adrian Washbourne