Science Friday - Tech Unions, Color Perception, Fish Vs Birds. Feb 19, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Reprogramming Labor In Tech More than 6,000 warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama are midway through voting on whether they should unionize. If the ‘yes’ votes win, it would be unprecedented for the company: The last time a unionization vote was held by Amazon’s United States employees, back in 2014, a group of 30 technicians ultimately voted not to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers. Meanwhile, at Google, a group of more than 800 have recently joined the Alphabet Workers Union, which was formed in early January. The AWU is a minority union, a kind of union that cannot negotiate contracts. But, the union has said, they will still be able to advocate for workers who would be excluded from a traditional union, like the temporary workers, contractors, and vendors who make up more than half of Google’s global workforce. And in the world of app-based gig workers, a debate has been raging for years about whether Uber and Instacart workers are full employees with rights to overtime and collective bargaining—or contractors, which have neither. In California, state law has changed twice in the last year to try to answer this question. SciFri producer Christie Taylor talks to legal scholar Veena Dubal, and historian Margaret O’Mara, about this rise in union activity, and the way tech companies have impacted our lives—not just for their customers, but also for their workers. Fish Versus Feather: Georgia’s Salt Marsh Smackdown At Science Friday, we love a smackdown, whether it’s a debate over which mammal has better sonar—dolphins versus bats—or which planet is the best to host signs of life—Mars or Venus? But when it comes to fish versus birds, we don’t need to manufacture drama. Nature gave us its own. Corina Newsome, a graduate student at Georgia Southern University, was studying how seaside sparrows adapt to nest flooding, an environment where the most likely predators are animals like minks and raccoons. That’s when she caught on film a very unusual interaction: A fish entered a sparrow’s nest, and killed one of the new hatchlings. Newsome joins Ira to explain what she saw, and how climate change is helping to turn the tables on this predator-prey relationship. The Neuroscience Behind Seeing Color The basic mechanics of how we see color sounds simple enough—light hits an object and bounces into our eye. Then, our brain processes that information. But how we perceive color is much more complicated. Neuroscientist and artist Bevil Conway is mapping out how the neurons in our brain respond to color to make a neurological color model. He explains how color might encode meaning, and the plasticity of our visual system. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Here at SciFry, you know, we love a good debate. We've pitted Mars versus Venus, Clash Dolphins versus Bat Sonar. And now there's some new contenders. Here's SciFri producer Katie Feather telling us more about it. Hi, Katie. Hey, Ira. Are you ready for another Smackdown? I am ready to rumble. How do you feel about birds versus fish? Well, it depends on the wine you're serving. Oh, oh, you mean in a fight?

Yeah, yeah. It's usually the birds getting the better of the fish, right? Like the fish are typically the prey, the birds are the predators. Yeah, that's how it goes. But Karina Newsom, a bird researcher and community manager for Georgia Audubon, captured the first ever instance of a fish predating a bird's nest. No, how does a fish get into a bird's nest? Right?

Well, this is where things get a little sad because these birds, Karina, is studying seaside sparrows, they make their nests in these three-foot-tall marsh grasses, and with climate change, their nests are getting flooded. I see, so the tide comes in, the nests are underwater now, and that sets the stage for the fish versus bird showdown. Right. And she captured all this on video. Hmm, if you ask me, that was kind of lucky.

Right? That's what I wanted to ask her first. How did she happen to have a camera aimed at a nest at the exact right moment? So as part of my research for my master's degree, I'm studying nest predation in the seaside sparrow. I was actually focusing on mammalian nest predators like raccoons and American mink and rice rats. But the nature of having a camera on a nest is that you see anything that goes on behind the scenes of marsh life. And then one night there was a nest flooding event where a fish jumped into the nest, was definitely not expecting that observation, but it happened to have.

happened while I was looking for mammalian predators. So what should we know about the seaside sparrow, the bird that you've been surveilling? So the seaside sparrow is a species of sparrow that when you look at it doesn't necessarily stand out visually. It's probably what you would imagine is the typical sparrow appearance. But they are a species that is found throughout the Atlantic and Gulf Coast of the United States. And here in Georgia, you can see this bird in the salt marshes and you can actually observe them from some of the causeways that lead from, for example, Brunswick to St. Simon's Island. They live in these coastal marshes and they are adapted to life in a salt marsh in a variety of ways, one of which, of course, being that they place their nest at a height off the ground that,

in theory, hopefully, allows them to avoid nest flooding, which increases if they are lower to the ground, and the risk of nest predation, which increases if they are higher off the ground. If they happen to lose a nest to nest flooding, if a high tide is higher than they are prepared for, their offspring die in a flooding event. They'll build another nest right away, but they'll build it higher off the ground. But because the threat of predation from terrestrial predators increases, the higher a nest is off the ground, that, of course, while relaxing maybe the threat of nest flooding, increases the threat of nest predation.

They're essentially trying to optimize the perfect nest location to avoid those opposing threats. How often did you catch something happening on these cameras? And how many of them did you have out there for this study? So at one time, I had somewhere between five and seven cameras that were active, typically at one time. And whenever a nest would stop being active, whether it was because it failed from predation or flooding or abandonment for some reason, or if it was successful and it fledged, I would move the given camera to a new nest. And so even though I was looking specifically at mammalian nest predation. There was all kinds of drama and interactions happening in the marsh. So I was able to catch nest predation happening from a mammal only about six times total.

I was able to also catch predation slash territoriality from marsh wrens, which is another species of bird that lives in the same ecosystem as the seaside sparrow. They're very territorial, about half their size, and they would fly to seaside sparrow nests and poke holes in the eggs and fly away. So their whole goal was to make sure that that nest failed. And so I was able to catch some kind of interspecies interaction about 12 to 15 times over the course of my field season. You must have gotten kind of attached to these nests when you were setting up these cameras. Like I could imagine that you were a little bit invested in the success of them. Yeah, definitely.

So for starters, you know, the labor of setting up a camera in a tidal environment, with lots of equipment that's sensitive to salt water and putting it on a nest takes a whole lot of work. So I really, even for that reason alone, was wanting to see a nest succeed, but also understanding the threats that seaside sparrows are facing in their ecosystems currently and what they're projected to experience in the future. Because of climate change, for example, sea level rise is expected to engulf the marsh. So their habitat availability is going to be reduced and fragmented. They're also exposed to increased flooding events that is expected to increase the frequency of nests flooding.

So understanding that they are facing a world of threats in the future and even currently makes me want every single nest that I see to be successful. That's not always the case. And there is an intricate web of interactions in the marsh. And the mammals that are out there serving as predators need to eat as well. And as much as it is a natural occurrence and a natural interaction, I was really sad anytime a nest was not able to success. fully fledged. Yeah, and you know, you were saying the predators need to eat, but apparently these fish do too, so what do we need to know about this fish? Like, you don't normally think of a fish as a bird predator. Right. So this fish is called the mummy chog, which is a very resilient,

you could say, species of fish. They can tolerate a really wide range of environmental variables. They can tolerate wide ranges in pH in dissolved oxygen. They are extremely hardy. Some have even described this fish as the raccoon of the fish. because they can survive and eat a wide variety of items. They've even been sent to outer space to see how they adjusted in a weightless environment, and they did just fine. So that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the mummy chog. But because they're omnivores, they can digest and do go after both plant and animal

material, it's not surprising that they would attempt to eat any kind of piece of flesh in their past. But I was surprised to see how readily the mummy chog went after a chick that compared to the size of the mummy chog was fairly large, right? And it had no hesitation to grab it and start attempting to rip pieces of meal off of the chick while it was in the nest. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Just do you're describing the, you know, piece of flesh is sending me back to watching that video. It's this video of this mummy chog eating the baby sparrow. I was incredibly conflicted about it because it was fascinating and cool, but also somehow really upsetting.

It was hard to resolve those feelings in myself when I was watching it. What was your first reaction when you saw this mummy chug and the baby sparrow? So that sparrow hatchling was in the nest with two sibling eggs that had not hatched yet. And that hatchling had actually emerged from its egg earlier that day. So it was only hours old. And so when I was watching this video and I saw the water start to enter the nest, my heart broke. You know, because I think this chick is brand new to planet Earth, right? and the first thing it experiences is cold water surrounding it and trying to survive.

But then when I saw the fish jump into the nest, I remember screaming. I couldn't even watch the rest before I started texting all of my friends and my colleagues and my advisor like, y'all, a fish is in a seaside's brown nest. What is happening? And so I essentially kept watching the video and was live texting my colleagues. And then when I saw the fish grab the chick, because at first I saw the fish basically look up at the chick. And I was like, it wouldn't. And sure enough, it did. It grabbed the chick.

And so while I am saddened, right? To my core, I was even tearing up. I had tears on my face. I was stunned. I could not believe what I was seeing. That was the most incredible, unexpected interspecies interaction that I have ever witnessed. And just the thought that like these are the kinds of things

that go on in the marsh at nighttime during high tide that people don't ever get to see. Because, I mean, who's just going out into the salt marsh putting, you know, cheap video cameras on seaside sparrow nests, you know? So it was, my mind was blown. I was very sad, but it was also very cool. So can we assume that mummy chogs may be making meals of little baby sparrows all the time in these marsh grasses? So it's hard to know how frequently this interaction presents itself.

Ness flooding is a threat that seaside sparrows have been facing for a long time, even before the climate change scenario that we're in now, because they have behavioral adaptations to this threat. But it would not surprise me if, in fact, this was a relatively common occurrence for nests that were low enough to the ground where the tide was able to enter the nest. And, you know, once chicks are over a certain size,

I wouldn't put anything past the mummy chog, but I would doubt that they would maybe pursue it as a food item as readily. But since I released that footage, you know, in the publication and on social media, I actually heard from another woman who studies salt marsh birds and puts cameras on nests as well that she has seen fish coming up to and approaching seaside sparrows

in the nest. So this definitely happens. And I think it's probably a regular occurrence, though I don't know how frequently. Wow. This just opens up just a whole new side of the fish v. Birds debate smackdown because you always imagine birds getting the better of fish. And now the tables have turned in this scenario. It's crazy. Exactly. And I am team bird through and through, but I will say this was a cool, a cool win for the fish. Could the seaside sparrow just find a more hospitable environment to living? Because this one seems to be really attacking it from all sides. Yeah.

So it would be great if seaside sparrows essentially had the evolutionary time. You know, to kind of adjust and maybe adapt to living in a slightly different environment that was not so threatened by climate change. But seaside sparrows are extremely well and specifically adapted for life in the salt marsh. they are adapted for drinking salt water, right? Their renal system is really well equipped for that. Their eggs can survive for 30 minutes completely submerged without drowning. They've got all kinds of adaptations that set them up for life in the salt marsh.

But unfortunately, the threats from climate change are happening so quickly that there is really not time for something as drastic as an ecosystem change for a bird like the seaside sparrow. So our best bet for protecting this bird into the future and preventing their extinction is to make sure that their habitat is able to exist for as long as possible into the future and in as much space as it possibly can exist going into the future and addressing the threats that are facing their habitat, including sea level rise and exposure to nest predators. And hopefully those management techniques will help to preserve this species and prevent their extinction. Well, we'll have to leave it there, but this is such an interesting story. And thank you for the work that you do and for

bringing us this video and this new piece of information that no one knew was happening between fish and birds, and we appreciate you. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Karina Newsom is a master's student in the Hunter Lab at Georgia Southern University and community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon. For Science Friday, I'm Katie Feather. We have to take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama who are voting on whether to unionize this month. And the relationship between tech companies and their employees. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. These days especially, we are utterly reliant on the work of

tech companies. We store our photos on Google Drive, right? An Amazon delivery person drops stuff off at her house. And while I haven't sat in an Uber in quite a few months, it would be my preferred way to get anywhere late at night. So, when producer Christy Taylor came to me, wanting to talk on a science show like ours about recent labor news at these companies, I was intrigued. But I'll bring her in to tell you about that. Hey, Christy. Hey, there, Ira.

Now, what do you mean when you say labor news, first of all? So I'm talking about labor union organizing events specifically. For example, right now, thousands of workers in an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, are currently in the process of taking a vote about whether they should unionize. If they succeed, that would be a first for warehouse employees in the U.S. at Amazon. So is it just Amazon then that we're talking about? So we're talking about other companies too. Like there's a group of white-collar Google employees who formed this unusual kind of union called a minority union,

specifically to pressure Google to make better ethical choices. And all over the country, app-based gig employees like Uber drivers are arguing that they're full employees with the right to ban together to demand higher wages and health insurance. Places like California and Seattle have even passed laws addressing this question in the last few years. Hi, you know, Christy, I was a bit skeptical about this story. We do talk technology here and not usually labor disputes, but I can see how the future of technology depends on the people working there. So please take it away. It really does. We talk a lot on this show about how tech as a product is affecting our lives, like the way social media could be undermining our very democracy. And I feel like if we're going to talk about how tech is affecting the people who consume it, we also really have to talk about the people who make. or enable it, and that includes Amazon warehouse workers. So I wanted to get a better understanding of how tech as an industry is shaping the lives of its workers and whether these companies are

actually that different from other jobs. I talked to Vina DuBall, a legal anthropologist and professor of law at the University of California in Hastings, and I talked to Margaret Omera, a professor of history at the University of Washington, and she's also author of the book, The Code, Silicon Valley, and the remaking of America. I started by asking Vina about whether she saw anything connecting these stories together in this particular moment in time? I think that in many ways, all of these workers are facing sort of extreme political and economic insecurity in this moment of the coronavirus. And what is remarkable is that they have all overcome the ways in which law has inhibited the rights of workers to collectively organize to

better their working conditions. To frame this question slightly differently, Mark, I think we'll have listeners whose response is, well, why would tech need unions? And then some other listeners who might see all these other professions with unions, teachers, sanitation, the Screen Actors Guild, and they're going to wonder why tech wouldn't be unionized. Margaret, what do you say to either of those questions? Well, I think when we think, you know, that the mental image of a tech worker is often a highly paid, highly educated engineer, you know, a techie sitting in a comfy campus with lots of amenities. free food, but actually the reality of tech work has long been, I liken it to a submerged iceberg. There have been the white-collar workers that you see above the surface, but tech always has relied on a large blue-collar workforce that has often been made invisible and been economically marginalized. And that workforce has always, this is a six or seven decade history here, it's been disproportionately female and workers of color. And that is one reason that they have been so

invisible and so marginalized. Vena? I would build on that just to say that more recently there is a recognition and amongst the workers themselves that they can imagine themselves as a sector in the same way that, you know, auto workers imagine themselves as a sector. Just over the last four years, you've seen really amazing alliances being built between the people who do things in Silicon Valley and sector like secure the buildings and serve the food, alliances between those workers and the workers who do engineering work as temp workers at Google at Facebook. Really interesting cross-class alliances that I think is hard for your listeners maybe to sort of have imagined or maybe they didn't imagine. I mentioned unionization efforts at Google and Amazon in the last few years.

Is there something special about now as a time where all all this is happening? Yeah, the reality is that these workers have come to understand that their companies are having impacts, social, political, and economic impacts in the world that do not sit well with them. You know, when we first saw a rise in protests in the tech industry just two years ago, the protests were not just about working conditions, although they did relate to sexual harassment on the job at Google, to the existence of non-conciness. on disclosure agreements to the reality that many of the workers were classified as contractors via temp agencies.

But they were also really focused on what the companies were doing, on the defense contracts, on the alleged role of some of these companies in detaining children at the border, in the role of these companies and furthering climate change. Workers started to see their labor conditions and their role at work as, being really intertwined with the problems that they saw with the world. And they wanted to have a say in that. That's a great point. And of course, the things that workers have often organized for, an eight-hour day, fair wages, you know, basic safety protocols on the factory floor, that's not something that, say, the alphabet union is organizing for their, they're well-paid,

they have good benefits, they have economic security. What they are using this, in a way, it's more akin to consumer activism, where you have boycotts of products or companies, where you're using your power as a buyer to persuade a corporation to behave differently. And the same thing goes for these workers who are, look, they're the most important asset, a company like Google has. It's all about recruitment, retention, getting the best people, building the best tech. And so if you are creating a public relations problem that is a human relations problem, a problem that is going to create a chill and dissuade future Googlers from coming to Google or people thinking that company X is a good place to work, then that has a tremendous amount of influence and pressure,

and that clearly is part of the calculation here. Yeah. I would just say, however, that one of the things that really brings them to the table is what they describe as a caste system at Google. So Google, similar to Uber and Lyft and all of these tech companies, they all use temp agencies. So many of the people, in fact, the majority of the people that Google hires every year, they hire indirectly through temp agencies. And those workers, while they certainly are making more than the minimum wage, actually live quite precariously in Silicon Valley. And those workers and the full-time employees describe really uneasible. equal system of worker benefits, of worker rights, and of treatment in the workplace between those contract workers, those temp workers, and the full-time employees, even though oftentimes

they're doing the exact same thing. And so I just want to emphasize that even in that instance, it actually is for some people labor conditions that bring them to the table. Yeah, the big story this month has been that upcoming vote at Amazon's warehouse. But there's also this new union at Google, the Alphabet Workers Union. And as I said before, it's a minority union. It doesn't represent all the workers. They can't force the company to make a contract. What else is new or different about that choice on the part of the Google Workers? Yeah. So I think what's really unique about the alphabet union is that you have these workers who are willing to not just organize, but to call themselves a union. In fact, reintroduce the language of minority unionism into the culture of labor in the

United States. In the U.S., a majority of people have to vote to join a bargaining unit before the company is forced to recognize that union and bargain with them. And in this particular instance, I think that the workers have recognized two things. One, that it will be nearly impossible to have a majority bargaining unit in a behemoth company like Google that spans different sectors, different industries, and has so many workers all over the world. Two, I think there is a a real recognition that they don't necessarily need to bargain directly with the company to exert power, that they can grow their power in the workforce through a minority union and exert power in the way that workers have traditionally done since the beginning of capitalism

through work stoppages, through protests, through other forms of direct action. What's fascinating is that these workers are addressing them internally, using worker power to draw attention to their concerns and to force the employer to address those things. What are the companies themselves saying? Why would they not want their workers to unionize, for example, if they've positioned themselves, as we see so often in Silicon Valley, as these progressive, open-minded workplaces? One of the reasons that Silicon Valley companies have so fiercely resisted unionization since day one is not only been philosophical about, you know, we're different kind of company, if we have a union,

that shows that we're not a family, and that's what old economy companies do, you know. But it also has to do with being agile, being able to scale up production really quickly and downsize really quickly, to meet the market. You know, go back to the days when the Valley was a hardware manufacturing zone of chips and, you know, making electronic devices. And you had to be, you know, early to market and move fast and be able to get the next generation product out and having a unionized manufacturing workforce got right in the way of that. And, you know, it's no surprise that these companies are among the very first to offshore work to East Asia in the 60s,

very early movers, you know, not to mention moving labor from California to right-to-work states in the South and Southwest. So this has been baked into the business model. And it also has to do with, look, this tech sector has grown large in an era when unions have lost their political power. and their membership. And at a time when Washington, D.C. has been dismantling the protections that workers and unions once had. Staying with the tech companies, Vena, Silicon Valley has been this place, especially recently with the languages. We're here to disrupt insert industry here, the Uber for insert industry here. Is there something there where they're also disrupting what it means to be a workplace? Like maybe they're right. A standard union doesn't fit them. So I think that we can

understand, particularly in the low-wage sector, looking at the so-called gig economy, we can understand the business model really as a form of union vesting in and of itself. You know, there's nothing about the Uber app that prevents the companies from providing unemployment insurance, providing minimum wage, providing overtime. But they have baked the idea that being able to offload workers very quickly, on board workers very quickly, and not having to provide these sort of basic things at the speed that their business model necessitates somehow is incompatible with basic rights and protections, including the right to unionize. And so rather than thinking of unions as being, you know, not the appropriate sort of representative body of this

workforce, I think that this workforce is formulated in a particular way so as to prevent unionization. You know, if you rely on a workforce that is casual, you know, many people are doing this to supplement another job. If you rely on a workforce that is atomized and dispersed, that doesn't have a place to gather in the way that gig workers don't have a place to gather, then you're going to be able to convince workers that there's not a way for anyone union to really represent your interests because your interests are not the same as your co-workers' interests. Just a quick reminder that I'm Christy Taylor and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Margaret, one of the most interesting things I've read that you've written lately was about the

history of the automobile and how the automobile industry of 100 years ago has these parallels to today's tech industry. Even this idea that the automobile industry was its own tech sector 100 years ago, the Apple or Google of 100 years ago. Shouldn't have blown my mind, but it did. So is there something here that we can learn from this history? Yeah, I think we can learn a lot. Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 19th, the 1920s. It was the most innovative place in the world. It was home to all new forms of production, as well as labor management relations, first on the terms of people like Henry Ford, who, as a tactic to retain workers and keep them from jumping ship to his competition, doubled the effective salary to $5 a day in the 19-teens.

You know, workers in the auto industry as it grew and became incredibly influential very quickly had tried doggedly to unionize and had been pushed back by very fiercely anti-union executives. And really what the tide turns in the 1930s. First, there is the Great Depression and economic realignment, a crisis. But most importantly, the Roosevelt administration is staffed with labor activists and reformers who for decades have been trying to advance the cause of worker rights in various forms at the state and local level. And under the Roosevelt administration, organized labor gains new rights, new powers, gets the right to organize, blessed by the federal government. And after that, it's a three-legged stool with management unions and the government working together to build. a stronger unionized manufacturing complex. And it's upward mobility, you know, the true

generational upward mobility where a union job for people with a less than a high school education becomes a path to economic security and stability and for creation of generational wealth. Yeah, and looking forward, we have a president who has talked about the value of good union jobs. He's determined to create them, including in the tech sector and things like transitioning the country to renewable energy and reducing our carbon emissions. As the legal person in the room, Vina, what would need to happen at the federal level for that to actually come to pass? So I think the most important thing that this administration can accomplish is to pass the Protect the Right to Organizing Act, which would amend some of our old labor laws that

have really given employers power over workers undermined their ability to organize and to form unions and give workers more power during disputes at work, really give teeth to laws that protect workers from retaliation. And for me, most excitedly, excitingly, really expand, make clear that the right to organize is a right borne by all workers. So right now, workers who are misclassified, like Uber and Lyft drivers, risk being accused of violating antitrust laws for trying to raise wages. If the Pro Act passes and includes a version of the ABC test extending collective organizing and bargaining rights to all of these workers, I think it would really disincentivize the kinds of working conditions you see both at the top at Google with their

contract workers, with their temp workers, as well as in the blue collar workforce, the technologically enabled blue collar workforce like Instacart shoppers, like Uber drivers, who are really really struggling, even to get funding because of these risks to do the organizing work that they need to do. This was also fascinating. Thank you both so much for joining me today. It was really fun and an honor. It was great to be here. Vina DuBall is a legal anthropologist and professor of law at the University of California in Hastings. And Margaret O'Meara, a professor of history at the University of Washington and author of the book The Code. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. Yep, Christy. An important and we will keep an eye on it.

We have to take a short break. When we come back, we'll talk about color perception. Does everyone see the same color red as you do? We'll take a look at how our brain decodes color coming up after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You've probably been in a hardware store and seen the wall of paint swatches, right? A giant colored chart laying out the various shades of yellow

that you're going to possibly paint your kitchen. But how do you know that your favorite mustard yellow really looks the same to everyone else? Interesting question, because how we perceive color is not, as you might say, so black and white. Producer Alexa Lim is here to tell us more. Hi, Alexa. Hey there, Ira. Okay, so my experience of mustard yellow, is it really that different from everyone else's? Well, Ira, you might remember the viral white and gold dress photo from a few years ago? Yeah, who can forget it? That's where some people were.

seeing the colors of the dress as golden white. And it was crazy. Other people were seeing it as black and blue. Yeah. People were really taking sides and saying, you know, I'm this type of person or this type of person based on how they were seeing the dress. And it basically broke the internet for a few days. But it also broke people's ideas about color perception. And you would think it's pretty straightforward. You know, the company, you go to one of these color charts, you choose a specific dye. But what people were seeing and perceiving in that photo, they were very different colors. Yeah, I remember they certainly were, and it really caused fistfights sometimes about what people were actually seeing. Yeah, exactly.

They were having different experiences, and people didn't know how to wrap their brains around that. But it's happened again. Again? Yes, it happened again. There was a shoe, the shoe of 2017, that kind of was the same phenomenon. Here's a photo of it, and I want you to tell me what color you see. To me, the sneaker looks like. a combination of blue and greenish, sort of ghoulishly looking.

Okay. I mean, we're on the same wavelength, no pun intended. You see it as blue and gray, so do I. But there were actually people who saw that shoe as pink and white. No, pink and white. Yeah. No way you could see that as pink and white. Like I try to stare at it in different angles, but it's always teal and gray to me.

So why is color perception so complicated? Well, that's a good question. It's the usual culprit that complicates things, Ira. it's your brain. Yeah, yeah. I'm with you on that also. Well, why is that? What's happening in your brain there?

Your eye takes in the signal, and then your brain interprets that data. And that is a complicated process. There's actually research looking at how context and expectations play a factor into how your brain processes and perceives color. Okay, I'm buying all of this, but I want you to tell me how we're able to study how our brain perceives color. That's a question I wanted to know, too. so I spoke to Bevel Conway, who was a neuroscientist at the National Eye Institute.

He's also an artist. And in his lab, he's mapping out how the neurons in our brain respond to color. He's trying to build a neurological color chart. It's basically a pantone system for our brain. And he's trying to study color from a different perspective. I asked him how much of our color vision happens in our eye versus our brain. It's a hard question to sort of parse out because, you know, it's like a chain. How much of the car is dependent. on the chassis versus the wheels versus the steering wheel. It's the whole package that comes together that makes it an automobile. And color vision, our experience of it, depends on a whole integrated set of processes. So the retina does a lot of heavy lifting to turn light signals into the electrical impulses

that are the building blocks that our brain uses to construct a perception of color. but you couldn't see color without the rest of your brain listening in on what the photoreceptors are doing. When I got into this business, I learned that there are two types of photoreceptors in the eye, rods and cones. And I thought that rods were for black and white vision and cones were for color vision. And it wasn't until graduate school when I learned that, no, rods are just for low light vision. cones are the photoreceptors you use for everything you think of as vision during normal daylight, like seeing black and white and motion and faces and places and navigation and reaching movements are all dependent on the three types of cone photoreceptors.

So color vision really depends on the brain kind of extracting from the cone photoreceptor responses, just the color component of the information. And that depends on a lot of neural circuitry, a lot of neurons circuits inside the brain that listen in on what happens at the photoreceptors. From an understanding of how photoreceptors work, one of the really key pieces of information is that the photoreceptors themselves are colorblind. They can't tell different wavelengths apart because each stimulus that you see not only has a wavelength, but it's also got an intensity, an amplitude of that wavelength. And both of those factors are going to affect how the photoreceptor works. So it's like going a certain distance. You can't tell how far you're going to go just by knowing the speed

because you also have to worry about how long you were traveling, what your time was. And so the visual system kind of downstream of the photoreceptors doesn't know all of these pieces. All it knows is, yep, a photoreceptor responded. The visual system has to do a lot of work to pull out the color information, given a really impoverished one little piece of information from the photoreceptor. And it's that that means that the photoreceptor activity has to be compared across different photoreceptors with different spectral tuning functions for the brain to actually get a representation of color.

Right. And you could say that like all of our senses have this perceptive quality to it. You hear sound and your brain processes it, but you still have to perceive what exactly that is. What is special about color? What's really quirky about color is that we just don't have a very good objective measuring device ruler for color. You know, I started this business thinking that wavelength was it. When you look at an object, you could measure the amount of different wavelengths reflected from that object. And doesn't that tell you the color? I mean, after all, we look at the rainbow and we see red, orange, yellow, green, blue.

we label the different wavelengths with different colors. But it turns out that actually, wavelengths don't really tell you what color you're seeing. We can take exactly the same set of wavelengths and have two people see them very different colors, like that famous dress image. It's the same physical light entering your eye under, you know, two different eyes, and they're seeing it in two very different ways. And we can go the other way. You can take two physically different things, like a yellow that's in the middle

of the rainbow, we call it monochromatic because it's got a single peak. You can take that yellow, but you can mix a yellow with theater lights just by projecting on the wall a red light and a green light and having them overlap where they merge. That will be as vivid a yellow as the monochromatic yellow. Yet those two yellows are two physically very different sets of wavelengths. So somehow the brain does this kind of alchemy to turn the photoreceptor signals into perception, It isn't a simple reflex of translating wavelength into color. And it's because really ultimately you need a brain in order to be able to see color

or reconstruct the colors as we experience them, because there's no measuring device that tells us what color there is. We're sort of stuck on our own. We can't appeal to some ruler out there and say, hey, tell me, are you right or am I right? Because we're sort of both right and both stuck just with the color experiences we have. It was interesting to find out that the study of color perception and color is a fairly new field. Well, it's tricky. I mean, on the one hand, the study of color psychology is a very old field that goes way back to the ancient Greeks.

In some ways, a lot of people think that color is irrelevant because you can get so much out of vision just from black and white. I was surprised to learn recently that the New York Times only started publishing their newspapers in color in the late 1990s. That was long after you could pretty easily and cheaply make color photographs. And there was this whole debate in the editorial staff about whether or not it was valid to use color.

Did color actually carry some kind of meaning? Or was it just a sort of, you know, a visual cheesecake, a little bit of fluff because it was too subjective and squishy? And I think that attitude permeates a lot of the kind of work that's happened in visual neuroscience. where we think of vision as telling us about what the stuff is out there in the world.

Like, what are the identities of objects in the world? And to do that, you really don't need color. I mean, you can do it perfectly well in a black and white picture. If you think vision is just to tell you what the stuff is there in the world, color doesn't really do that for you. And so I think a lot of people have kind of been scouting around in the dark thinking, well, maybe color just isn't really what we should be thinking of. Maybe it's just a little extra frill that we acquired in the visual.

system that's not really for anything. And that just rubbed me the wrong way when I was in graduate scholar. I was like, that can't be true. Right. Well, that's a good way to segue into, I want to talk about what you're doing in your lab. You're studying color by looking at the neurons in the brain. What are you finding out? Yeah, we got really interested in this question of what is color actually for in terms of behavior. If I ask you, what's the color of a banana? A lot of people will say, well, a banana is yellow. Then I sort of say, well, but hang on a minute, are all the of bananas you've ever seen yellow? And people are like, well, no, actually, I've seen green bananas and black bananas and actually come to think of it. Most of the bananas in the world are probably

not yellow. So why is it that we think of bananas as yellow? And I think the answer is that what you hear in my question, what are the colors of bananas that you care about? And it's that little clause what you care about that I think points to something deep and fundamental about the role of color and behavior. And it's why we're studying it. So we're interested in trying to understand how to visual objects acquire meaning, that is subjective meaning. And to do that, color becomes this really powerful tool. A recent study, for example, what we were interested in doing is trying to figure out whether or not we could decode from the brain what colors people were seeing. Could we listen in on the brain activity directly and then see from the pattern of brain activity,

could we decode? Could we see what color people said they were looking at? And to do that, we use this technique called magnetoencephalography. Each neuron fires an action potential. It communicates with electrical impulses. People just sit with one of these big caps over their heads, and the cap measures these tiny little magnetic fields that are induced every time the neurons fire. And so we showed people colored stimuli. We asked them what colors they saw. And then we use these machine learning algorithms to basically learn the different patterns of activity, the association of those patterns of activity with what colors people saw. So can you then tell what color I'm looking at by looking at my brain scan and seeing what neural pattern is happening and say she's looking at brown?

Is that how it works? It's basically exactly like that. So the way it works in real time is that we have to first present a whole bunch of colors. And then for each color, we get a pattern of activity in the brain, and we do it a whole bunch of times for the same color and then lots of different colors. And then we train up these algorithms to learn the relationship between different patterns of activity that were elicited by each color and the color label that you assign to it. And then we can give you a brand new stimulus that you haven't seen before or a new example or a new presentation of the stimulus. and we can say, okay, fancy algorithms, which color do you think that was? And our success is, it varies a little bit, but it's upwards of 80, 80% or so of the time we get it right,

which is way better than chance. And it'll get better and better as the technology gets better and better. So we can't really do it in real time just yet. But for now, we can pretty reliably tell you what color you were seeing, given the pattern of activity in your brain. I'm Alexa Lim, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And so then you also looked at like, do people have similar relationships between different colors as well? So what we did is we looked at the pattern of brain activity to different colors, and we asked whether or not the colors that you think of as similar,

so reds and oranges are kind of similar, they're both warm colors, do those colors cause similar patterns of brain response to colors in, in my brain and in your brain. And by the same token, colors like red versus green that are quite different colors, a warm color and a cool color, do they cause very different patterns of activity

in your brain compared to my brain? And that turned out to be true. Taking one step further is kind of fascinating because from those relationships, how the different patterns of brain relate to each other for different colors, we can then reconstruct a geometry of color space determined by the brain response itself.

So this idea of a color space is a very old one. Anybody who uses a computer is familiar with the hue saturation value color space. There are gazillions of different kinds of color spaces. You know, Pantone has a very famous one. Why are there so many different color spaces? You know, if they're all derived because of how the brain processes color information, shouldn't there be like a color space defined by how the brain works? We could reconstruct the geometry of that neural representation.

And it revealed all sorts of cool things. Like there isn't one static geometry. It's actually kind of quite dynamic over time, which itself was like a big discovery. It's sort of new to us. We're taught that certain colors have certain meanings. A red bug can mean, I'm dangerous, don't eat me. I mean, how does this kind of biological aspect play into these ideas? Yeah, so, you know, we've spent a fair amount of time, as of lots of others, trying to figure out, like, why do we have color vision in the first place?

I mean, what are the evolutionary selective pressures that moved us towards having color vision? And, you know, some of the great old ideas are, well, color signals in a hardwired way, as you've just described, you know, like red means X, red means, you know, danger. It becomes a little complicated because red also means love, right? You know, there's lots of meanings that can be attached to colors. And so I think although it's certainly true that there are selective pressures in evolution that pushed us to have color vision, I think the selective pressures are because color provides nice way of capturing a lot of information about an object that's divorced from its shape. So there are lots of different red things, not all dangerous things are red and not all red

things have the same shape. So it becomes a kind of abstract property that we can encode, that we can then use to tell what things have meaning out there in the world. And that's, you know, one of the great features of the nervous system, especially of the human nervous system, is its ability to solve problems that it hasn't yet encountered. If you want to solve the problem of detecting the dangerous red bug, then you've got a problem. and evolution could work to try and solve how to detect the dangerous bug, and you might end up with a visual system that can detect red objects. But it's a harder problem to say, hey, you know, nervous system.

What I want you to do is to figure out how to get your wiring so that you can solve problems that you haven't yet encountered, like bugs that may be different colors or different shapes and so on. And I think that's really what color vision is allowing us to do. It's a kind of an adaptable system, a trainable system where colors can take on new kinds of meanings depending on the environment, depending on what uses we place on the visual system. Well, we've run out of time. Thanks so much for joining us.

It's been fun to talk to you. Beville Conway is a senior investigator at the National Eye Institute and an artist based out of Bethesda, Maryland. For Science Friday, I'm Alexa Lynn. Color perception is always a fascinating topic. all the time we have for today. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, yes, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And of course, we're active all week long on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If you like to email us the old-fashioned way, you can do that too. SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send us feedback. Tell us what

you'd like us to cover. Always looking to hear from you. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.