Is the colour you see the same as what I see? It’s a question that has puzzled both philosophers and neuroscientists for decades, but has proved notoriously difficult to answer... Now, a study that recorded patterns of brain activity in 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way in the brains of different people.
The researchers found that in most cases they were able to predict which colour was being viewed by a participant in this second group, using the patterns of brain activity they had seen in the first group. They also found that different colours were processed by subtly different areas within the same region of the visual cortex, and that different brain cells responded more strongly to particular colours. These differences were consistent across participants.
The paper on Journal of Neuroscience (sadly not open access): https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2025/08/29/JNEUROSCI.2717-20.2025
My critique is... the researchers are based in Tubingen, Germany, and I assume most of their 15 participants are of European cultural heritage (cannot verify... no open access). I would love to see if they can replicate this in a more multi-cultured setting. Some Asian cultures have rather different verbiage for different colors, and I wonder whether that would bias ppl's perception.
This is completely missing the point, which is that qualia are only experienced by the conscious mind. They cannot be measured by anything other than the mind of the person experiencing them.
Measuring that the brain activity is the same is not sufficient to prove this unanswerable philosophical question. You would have to also prove that different minds have the same experience while exhibiting the same neural activity - a problem which reduces to the same question: is my experience of blue the same as yours?
I think this is the closest we have ever gotten to being able to answer the question. But yes, it might not ever be completely solvable