Bay Bridge Optometry

Super interesting! The center (and most important part) of the retina is called the macula and it’s packed with cone-shaped photoreceptors which allow us to see colors. Remember the rods and the cones from science class? (The rods allow us to see shades of gray.) This brief research article says that we actually see the world in true color only in our central vision, but our brains just fill in the colors in our peripheral vision..

Why do our brains do this? We don’t know the answer to that yet! My theory is that it has to do with energy consumption of the photoreceptors. Perhaps the cone-shaped photoreceptors require more energy to process colors, so it’s more efficient for the brain to simply fill in colors instead of actually processing the information for it. Another one of the mysteries of our bodies! Good article!

Dartmouth scientists have discovered how our brains see the color spectrum, and it’s trippy AF A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that most people only see color in the dead center of their visual field.

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