Color Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Never has a dumb meme on the internet been more true!

Wow that is strange. Something I have never really thought about. i thought all people saw the same thing apparently I was wrong

Fascinating stuff OP. I remember reading somewhere that we have cones in the eye- think icecream- that captures light and sends the signals to our brains. So, the thing is, men have like 3 cones while woman have 5 or 6. Thats why women can distinguish between baby poo brown and fingernail yellow. We men, unfortunately, have to make due with only the primary colours. And they say men have it easy...


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reply to post by Monkeygod333

I did not know this, thanks for the info. It makes me wonder if there are any cultural differences in the number of or characteristics of cones in the eyes. ckitch started another thread with more insight *, and the more I dig into this the more I am unsure about it.
Hey is that your drawing in your avatar? Tis pretty cool.

spec

Some more interesting info regarding colorblindness:

Scientists at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Florida restored normal vision to two colour-blind monkeys. The technique could prove to be a safe and effective cure for colour blindness and other visual disorders related to the cones in the retina.

“Although colour blindness is only moderately life-altering, we have shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate and that it can be done very safely,” said Professor William Hauswirth, an ophthalmic molecular geneticist at the University of Florida. “That is extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone diseases that really are blinding.”

It seems part of our perception process is also genetic in that our rods and cones functionality,or lack of, plays a part in all of this.

Normal colour vision requires three types of cone in the retina, sensitive to light in the blue, green, and red parts of the spectrum.

The success of the treatment in adult animals demonstrated that the brain is able to rewire itself to take advantage of new receptors even in adulthood. The virus used to deliver the L optin gene, called adeno-associated virus, is not known to cause disease in humans. Two years on from the study, the monkeys have shown no adverse effects from the treatment.

www.timesonline.co.uk...
So the information 'coded' and sent to our brain helps determine what we see too, and by completing that code, that may be deficient, they are able to return the color perception. I had not considered this and thought any genetic problems would be in the formation and/or number of rods and cones, but instead it is a matter of the genes firing correctly.

Peace,
spec

I'm more fascinating by the things we don't see. The visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum is very small compared to the full range. What we see is relative to this.

Is it possible to see things in a pitch black cave? With radar it's! Like sea creatures. Instead of depending on another light source to reflect light on your eyes, YOU are the light source!

Aliens might see our colors much differently or more likely they may not even see them at all.

When was the last time you saw a radio wave or a magnetic field?

The reason we see visible light is because we survive on earth in this spectrum of color. So that means we need to be able to see the light so that we can work with it.

Light outside this range are invisible. (actually it's electromagnetic waves)

Also.. some humans can see more ultraviolet and/or infared than others.

Just like... some people hear better than others. It's mostly unnecessary though.

Which makes me wonder. Could a creature be electromagnetic and invisible to us? It seems impossible to me that a creature would not have conventional matter. Just energy?

I've always thought of energy as information, not as a information PROCESSOR. Life is a information processor. So how can a energy lifeform exist if it's just information?

Here is the entire episode of Horizon. It's really a fascinating documentary. One of the more interesting I've seen in quite a while.

reply to post by constantwonder

Thanks cw, I'll give it a watch tonight.

Peace,
spec

Sometimes this kind of stuff is ambiguous. Things like translation can also throw it off. Maybe somebody was having a bad day when it came to translating aqua, aquamarine, azure, cerulean, cobalt, cyan, teal, turquoise, ultramarine, etc. from English into Russian...

Anyhow, this is why things like the Pantone system was invented. (There are others, but Pantone is probably the most well known color system.) Give a number and a spec. and you've got the exact color. At least in pigments.

Additive color as in lights still has some ambiguity though. (At least in common use. Particularly if you're not doing it on a scientific basis and not using angstroms or color temperature in degrees kelvin.) You can give a RGB hex-code triplet to get fairly close though. However monitors and graphics cards still don't have a standardized gamut, and color calibration is still to expensive for everyday use. (And because of the variation in gamut across display setups, color calibration is a bit useless for anything online. It's main use is for pre-press.)

Then you have the issues of perceptual color caused by what colors of light are hitting various pigments. If you were looking for a certain color as you perceive it, you probably wouldn't choose the same color in a room lit only by incandescent lights as compared to a room lit only by florescent lights.

But there is one interesting point, color really could be perceived differently by different people. The thing is, outside of stuff like colorblindness, it's currently impossible to prove. If they ever get the tech to perform a full retina transplant or transplant of the optic nerve - then we'll know for sure. Because then somebody would be able to say something about various colors in their perceptual spectrum being swapped.