No One Could See the Colour blue until modern times!

originally posted by: AutumnWitch657
Color names change . When I was a kid we had maroon now it's wine or burgundy. Puce and scarlet are now merely reds. Dark purple is eggplant. Chartreuse is green. Mauve, Dusty rose. I think it's language rather than not seeing the dominant color of the planet.

I blame Crayola.

My girlfriend brought home a box of over 150 different color crayons for the kids to color with and one of them is named 'laser yellow' that would have previously just been called maybe something like 'lemon yellow'. I think of red when I think of lasers, not yellow... But it sounds cool.

Now future generations will think red lasers are a kind of yellow, all thanks to crayons.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Damn these hilariously priceless ATS one liners!

It's not true, and don't know why blue was considered taboo to write. But having dabbled in spinning and weaving and researched indigo vat dying, for example, its ancient.

sites.google.com...

All very interesting, and it brings me to a little theory of my own...

Do we all see the same colors?

When I see blue, I call it blue, but others may see the same color as red, or green.

Of course, we say it is red, and we know how light is refracted to show the colors, but your beautiful sky blue could actually be pink to another observer, it all depends on how your brain interprets the data.

Peace

Sa reply to: Shadow Herder

Blue is a primary color. It combined with one of the others red or yellow plus black or white will make every other color. Blue is represented throughout nature and of course is in the fractals of a prism.
Evolution doesn't work in microcosm scale. When modern man homo sapien sapien came into being he was exactly as we are today. Capacity for learning and the five senses haven't changed . Why would anyone think perception of color would change? Nothing in history indicates widespread color blindness in any segment of society or race.
Color in ancient artworks show the use of blue as far back as we have found samples.
Earlier cultures started with paints in the henna (red), ochre (yellow) and indigo (blue) shades that could be made from common plants. Early art examples show use of blue.
Where does the question fit with what we know?

i'd have to say that this is bullsh@@.

i doubt that these were made because they had a neutral color.



Homer lived 8th /9th century bc, most of these are dated well before that.

ETA: this is from the wiki that the above pictures came from.

The Greeks imported indigo dye from India, calling it indikon. They used Egyptian blue in the wall paintings of Knossos, in Crete, (2100 BC). It was not one of the four primary colours for Greek painting described by Pliny the Elder (red, yellow, black and white), but nonetheless it was used as a background colour behind the friezes on Greek temples and to colour the beards of Greek statues.[15]
Blue

a reply to: Shadow HerderThis is interesting and Im not going to dispel it out of hand, because it occurred to me that something might in fact effect our ability to sense colors.

We know the oxygen content of the atmosphere has gone from the high of 35% give or take, to the present 19 - 21%

Could the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere have anything to do with our ability to "See" colors. Would it not effect the spectrum concerning our senses?? Just a thought..

originally posted by: Shadow Herder
a reply to: AutumnWitch657

I wonder if just maybe our ancestors lacked a mutation to see blue.

Science states we all preceive colors diffrently and agree to call it what everyone calls it, orange being orange but if I had your eyes it would look purple to me.

Blue eyes are a recent mutation of less than 12000 years.

There was an experiment that demonstrated this. Various color panels was placed on a wall. Volunteers were asked to create that color by mixing together the light from two projector lamps by turning two dials. The results demonstrated that there was a good variation between the settings of dials from person to person.

Human vision is known to work on three color-opposition systems; light vs. dark, red vs. green, yellow vs. blue

Red-green would be useful in the desert, being able to tell the different between earth and green vegetation, as well as the freshness of vegetation. Yellow-blue would be useful to tell the difference between water and sand. Just about every critter has the ability to distinguish between light and dark, and many also have the ability to see UV wavelengths. Humans gave up the ability to see UV as a trade off for being to live longer (UV light eventually damages the retina).

a reply to: Watchfull

That is a much deeper question of reality when everything we perceive comes to us indirectly from any given observation. Nerves are the conduit to the outside world. When they function normally our reactions to external stimulation seems to be the same. We jump at loud noises, we pull away from heat we seek warmth from cold we react the same To different tastes. Sour will make us pucker, sweet makes us lick our lips, we recognize salt the same and too much will make us reject a food. We react to different smells the same even very young babies so it's not just social conditioning. I think we can safely assume we perceive colors and sights the same way too. So far no one has shown any unique perceptions.

a reply to: Aldakoopa

The safest bet for a gift for me when I was a child was a big yellow and green box of crayola crayons. Back then they only had 64 colors but oh my goodness how I was inspired by those choices. There were six different purples alone!

Actually that would be closer in description than blue anyway no? Any appendage engorged with blood is wine dark. a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

a reply to: theabsolutetruth

Did you know that blue lighting has a blood pressure lowering effect whereas red light has the opposite effect.

I was under the assumption that that high was before man. Am I wrong?a reply to: All Seeing Eye

originally posted by: DjembeJedi
Makes me wonder what year these showed up?

nice info..S&F

I do know they were originally only available in yellow lol

a reply to: AutumnWitch657

There are slight differences between the colour perceptions of men and women. And some exceptions, due to evolution.

www.livescience.com...

Abramov and his team from CUNY's Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges compared the vision of males and females over age 16 who had normal color vision and 20/20 sight — or at least 20/20 vision with glasses or contacts.

In one part of the study, the researchers asked the volunteers to describe different colors shown to them. They found that the guys required a slightly longer wavelength of a color to experience the same shade as women and the men were less able to tell the difference between hues. [Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue]

The researchers also showed the participants images made up of light and dark bars that varied in width and alternated in color so that they appeared to flicker, a measure of participants' sensitivity to contrast. Compared with the women, the male volunteers were better able to identify the more rapidly changing images made up of thinner bars, the researchers said.

www.livescience.com...

But these evolved responses to color have nothing to do with cone cells, or our perceptions. In 1998, scientists discovered a totally separate set of color-sensitive receptors in the human eye; these receptors, called melanopsin, independently gauge the amount of blue or yellow incoming light, and route this information to parts of the brain involved in emotions and the regulation of the circadian rhythm. Melanopsin probably evolved in life on Earth about a billion years prior to cone cells, and the ancient color-detectors send signals along an independent pathway in the brain.

"The reason we feel happy when we see red, orange and yellow light is because we're stimulating this ancient blue-yellow visual system," Neitz said. "But our conscious perception of blue and yellow comes from a completely different circuitry — the cone cells. So the fact that we have similar emotional reactions to different lights doesn't mean our perceptions of the color of the light are the same."

People with damage to parts of the brain involved in the perception of colors may not be able to perceive blue, red or yellow, but they would still be expected to have the same emotional reaction to the light as everyone else, Neitz said. Similarly, even if you perceive the sky as the color someone else would call "red," your blue sky still makes you feel calm.

a reply to: MasterMaximum

I do know that and I just posted a comment on it before reading yours.

Here is the science behind it.

www.livescience.com...

Other research shows differences in the way we each perceive color don't change the universal emotional responses we have to them. Regardless of what you actually see when you look at a clear sky, its shorter wavelengths (which we call "blue") tend to make us calm, whereas longer wavelengths (yellow, orange and red) make us more alert. These responses — which are present not just in humans, but in many creatures, from fish to single-celled organisms, which "prefer" to photosynthesize when the ambient light is yellow — are thought to have evolved as a way of establishing the day and night cycle of living things.

Because of how the atmosphere scatters sunlight throughout the day, blue light dominates at night and around midday when living things lie low, to avoid darkness or harsh UV light. Meanwhile, yellow light dominates around sunrise and sunset, when life on Earth tends to be most active.

In a study detailed in the May issue of the journal Animal Behavior, Neitz and his colleagues found that changing the color (or wavelength) of ambient light has a much bigger impact on the day-night cycle of fish than changing the intensity of that light, suggesting that the dominance of blue light at night really is why living things feel more tired at that time (rather than the fact that it's dark), and the dominance of yellow light in the morning is why we wake up then, rather than the fact that it's lighter. [Busting the 8-Hour-Sleep Myth: Why You Should Wake Up in the Night]

But these evolved responses to color have nothing to do with cone cells, or our perceptions. In 1998, scientists discovered a totally separate set of color-sensitive receptors in the human eye; these receptors, called melanopsin, independently gauge the amount of blue or yellow incoming light, and route this information to parts of the brain involved in emotions and the regulation of the circadian rhythm. Melanopsin probably evolved in life on Earth about a billion years prior to cone cells, and the ancient color-detectors send signals along an independent pathway in the brain.

"The reason we feel happy when we see red, orange and yellow light is because we're stimulating this ancient blue-yellow visual system," Neitz said. "But our conscious perception of blue and yellow comes from a completely different circuitry — the cone cells. So the fact that we have similar emotional reactions to different lights doesn't mean our perceptions of the color of the light are the same."

Regardless of the words used the paintings clearly show blue skin. You know that saying about pictures speaking a thousand words? Maybe Sanskrit had lots of words for blue. I understand Eskimos have multiple words for snow.

reply to: Namdru

originally posted by: AutumnWitch657

Actually that would be closer in description than blue anyway no?

I would not know as I have never suffered from that horrific affliction.

a reply to: theabsolutetruth

Ha see I knew where you was going.