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Mind

Do we all see red as the same colour? We finally have an answer

It is impossible for us to know exactly how another person's experience of the world compares to our own, but a new experiment is helping to reveal that colour is indeed a shared phenomenon

By Sophie Berdugo

6 March 2025

What does red look like?

Image Professionals GmbH / Alamy

Does everyone experience colour in the same way? A new investigation into this long-standing philosophical question has provided the strongest evidence yet that people with typical colour vision do indeed share the same subjective experiences of colour.

Putting our subjective conscious experiences into words is notoriously challenging, making it hard to directly compare how our reality lines up to someone else’s, but researchers have previously tried various tricks to get around this.

One technique,…

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