Colour Naming and the Brain

Abstract

This chapter provides an extremely basic account of the physiology of colour vision as it pertains to colour naming.¹ It makes little attempt to capture the nuances and the controversies of an extremely complex science. I am also concerned with the relationship between the neurophysiology of colour and its psychophysics (discussed in the last chapter). We have seen that the linguistic colour space is distinct from the opponent channels space. One important question that we will address, in this chapter, is the relationship between the opponent channels space and what may be called the “physiological channels space” (Thompson 1995a, p. 98).