Perception seems to be a very strange and totally unexplained phenomena at present. Firstly, try to imagine a totally different colour. You will find this to be impossible simply because our imagination is limited by the things we have already experienced. Now, I want to know if our brain can "see" new colours that we have never deen before. So allow me to give a quick review of how humans "see" the outside world.
Light waves travel from a distant object and enter our eyes, where they interact with photoreceptor cells in our retina, where they are converted into electrical pulses. These pulses travel through the optic nerve until they arrive at the visual cortex, where they are "interpreted" by the brain. Now, different wavelengths of light will generate different electrical pulses in the retina and this is what allows us to distinguish between these different wavelengths. However, our photoreceptor cells can only interact with a very small band of wavelengths, and above or below a certain wavelength value, they are unable to generate electrical pulses at all. So therefore, our interpretation of the outside world is not necesarily limited by our brain, but rather by our eyes.
This got me thinking. If we were to hypothetically connect up a device to the optic nerve which could produce artificial electrical pulses which our eyes cannot, how would our brain interpret these signals? Would we "see" a totally different "colour"? Could this experiment open up a different view of the world to us, and possibly revolutionise our understanding of the way we observe our universe? Does anybody here have any idea what would happen in this experiment?