Professor Patrick Cavanagh says "V8," the moniker a team of which he was part coined for an area of the brain they identified, sounds like an appropriate name for a "juice or a motor or something."

But following a system of nomenclature in which areas of the brain responsible for vision are named V1, V2, V3 and so forth in order of their discovery, the researchers were obliged to name the new area of the visual system they identified after the tomato-based juice.

"Kind of a funny name," Cavanagh admitted.

Cavanagh was one member of a team headed by Nouchine Hadjikhani, a research fellow at Harvard-affiliated Mass. General Hospital, that pinpointed the function of the new brain region, which they believe to be responsible for color vision. Their results were published in the July edition of Nature Neuroscience.

Cavanagh explained the discovery with a historical analogy. What the previous researchers had done, he said, was "like finding North America and calling it China."

"This isn't China," he said, "It's V8."

Thirty years of color research

The story of how the brain region came to be named after a vegetable juice has its roots in over thirty years of research on how the brain processes color.

When your eye sees an object, the image is first processed by your retina, then by a lower brain area, and then by the cerebral cortex. The image first goes to the least specialized region of the cortex, known as V1. As information is subject to more processing, it goes to higher and more specialized areas of the visual cortex designated as V2, V3 and so forth.

English scientist S. A. Zeki thought he had identified the region of the brain used to recognize color in the 1970s. Working with macaque monkeys, Zeki found that there was one region of the brain, V4, responsible for color and another, V5, respon- sible for motion.

This theory predicted some bizarre disorders,which were soon identified in his clinic.

A woman was found who was terrified of crossingthe street because she could not perceive motion.She would see cars in one place and then find themsuddenly pop up in another but she did not seethem move.

She was found to have a lesion in V5 but not tobe deficient in any other respect.

There was also the famous case of a artist whoselectively lost the ability to see color after anaccident. He had a lesion in V4 only.

The relationship between the vision disordersand the brain abnormalities lent credence toZeki's theory that certain areas of the brain areresponsible for specific functions like motion andcolor perception.

But as time went on, Hadjikhani, explained, itbecame clear that "no one really knew where thecolor processor was situated in the brain." Datacast doubt on whether even the macaque colorprocessor was really located in region V4.