The question that worries scientists and philosophers is: do we really see the world differently? For example, do two healthy people have the same color perception, or will red be unequally red for each, and blue will have different saturation for different viewers? An international group of researchers studied the color perception of people from different countries.
An international group of researchers studied the color perception of people from different countries. It turns out that regardless of origin and cultural characteristics, we see colors approximately the same. Moreover, the names of colors in human languages appeared in accordance with their intensity - that is, in the order in which they are perceived by visual receptors.
The experiment, carried out by Italian and Indian researchers, resembled a guessing game. Two volunteers communicated virtually. One of them was shown several objects of the same color, and he had to explain to the second what shade he saw - of course, without naming it. To describe the color, the experiment participant chose a substitute word. According to scientists, despite cultural differences, the second participant in most cases quickly guessed what color was meant. The experiment lasted until both participants came to a “consensus” on the name of a particular color.
The scientists were also able to determine which colors were easiest for the volunteers to describe. In first place was, as you might guess, red. Next came purple-red, violet, green-yellow, blue, orange and cyan. It is curious that this sequence roughly corresponds to the order in which the names of colors appeared in a particular culture and, accordingly, language. The most “ancient” colors, the designations of which appeared in human speech, are considered to be white, black and red.
“For example, if there was a common designation for the color red in a population, there was likely a designation for both white and black,” says Francesca Tria, a physiologist in Turin, Italy, and co-author of the study. If the language already had a name for green, then it certainly had a word for red, she adds.
In human development, the moment when a child begins to perceive colors is the most important stage in the formation of the psyche. Child psychologists and physiologists believe that color is one of the first signs by which a child recognizes certain objects. Young children are usually drawn to bright colors. At first they operate with a very limited palette, which expands as they grow older. Children's color preferences change with age. Until the age of ten, most of them say their favorite colors are red (or pink) and yellow.
After ten, many people begin to prefer blue or green. With normal development, by the age of four or five, children are already able to distinguish and name colors, but only by the age of five or six do they develop the perception of color as an unchanging feature. It is curious that until the age of eight to ten they retain a tendency to draw objects in the colors they like, regardless of the actual shade of the depicted objects (multi-colored flower stems, pink sky, blue sun, etc.).
The basic “color series” (the order in which color names appear), observed in cultural and linguistic studies, remains unchanged. Apparently, the whole point is that it coincides with the physiological sensitivity of the human eye: our receptors see red better than blue. And in the process of language formation, man first of all gave names to vitally important phenomena. Since red is the color of blood and fire, it is not surprising that the word for it appeared earlier than for others.
True, there are still some cross-cultural differences. For example, the languages of "primitive" agricultural peoples have many words for shades of green - out of the need to control the growth and maturation of plants and estimate the size of the future harvest. The concept of “basic” colors was also different in different cultures.
In the Ancient East there were five of them, in medieval Europe - only three (at first - red, yellow and blue, later - red, green and blue). Artists recognize red, blue and yellow as the primary colors, and consider the rest to be products of their mixing. Achromatic colors (white and black) are considered analogues of absolute illumination (white is sunlight not divided along the spectrum) and absolute darkness (black).
The meanings of white and black in culture generally differ the most - apparently because these colors are difficult to find in nature in their pure form. Among different peoples, they had rather a symbolic meaning. In European culture, black symbolized the negative aspects of life: it is the color of mourning, the color of dark forces, black magic. A black cat (less often a dog, but also certainly black) in the Middle Ages was considered an attribute of a witch.
In Eastern cultures, black has a completely different meaning. In Japan, it is a symbol of nobility, age and experience; it is not without reason that the black belt is a sign of the highest skill in martial arts. In Turkic history and toponymy, “black” (kara) also meant “big”, “great”: the Karakhanid Empire - “great khans”, Kara-Kum - “great sands”, that is, “Great Desert”.
Human eyes and brains have evolved to discern colors in the sunlit world. Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths produce different colors. Light hits the retina at the back of the eye, where pigments activate neural connections in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that translates signals into images.
The brain figures out what color of light is reflected from the object that the eyes see, and separates that color from the color it considers “real.” “Our visual system is supposed to throw out information about lighting and extract information about the color that is actually reflected,” Neitz said. “But I've been studying individual differences in color perception for 30 years, and these differences in dress color perception are the most striking I've ever seen,” added the neuroscientist (Nitz herself sees white and gold in the photo).
Usually the color perception system works without failures. Humans have evolved to see in daylight, but light can change colors. The color of sunlight changes from pinkish-red at dawn and blue-white at midday to red at dusk. “Your visual system pays attention to these color changes and tries to discount some of the color shifts throughout the day,” said Wellesley College neurologist Bevil Conway. “Thus, people either do not perceive the color blue, and then they see white and gold, or, conversely, gold - and then they look at a blue and black dress,” the scientist concluded (he sees blue and orange in the photograph).
In other words, TJournal explains, in the case of a photograph, people mistake the light in the background for sunlight and conclude that the dress is in the shadow, which means its light areas should turn bluish. So, there is no pure white color, but our brain comes up with the whiteness of snow or a dress for us.
Others ignore the light in the background and see a blue dress. They call the gold fragments black because they remember that if you look at a black object in the bright sun, you can see gold. In addition, it is likely that some of the people who saw blue knew in advance about the real color of the dress, and because of this, the brain gave the correct answer. If we sample the colors of the dress in Photoshop, we find that the colors of the dress are bluish and greenish-brown.
Swiked posted a photo of the dress on February 25 asking what color it was. According to her, she argued about it with friends. She added that the dress is actually blue. Internet users quickly began to argue about this topic, and the hashtag #thedress topped the top Twitter trends in the United States. Joining the discussion were Kim Kardashian (white and gold), singer Kanye West (blue and black), singer Taylor Swift (blue and black) and David Duchovny (greenish blue). The Sony Play Station account in Australia also joked on this topic: “Introducing the new white and gold Dualshok 4 controller.” The manufacturer of the dress has already stated that for now only the blue version is on sale, but the white and gold version will soon be available for sale.
On February 27, almost the whole world went crazy because of an ordinary, at first glance, dress - show business stars, fashion gurus, and ordinary social network users argued about what color the dress shown in the photograph was. The media promised to reveal the secret of the dress and explain why some saw a blue-black dress, while others saw a white and gold one, writes Gazeta.Ru.
It all started with a social network user. The girl published a photo of the dress that had not yet made a splash and asked her friends to help her determine its color. “Guys, please help. We've already lost our minds with our friends and family, we can't decide the color of this dress.", she wrote. After this publication, not only she, but the entire progressive world went crazy.
What color is the dress actually?
We also joined a survey launched by the BuzzFeed portal, in which their opinions, like the opinions of the whole world, were divided into two camps. Some saw a blue and black dress in the photograph (as in all other statistics, these turned out to be a minority), others clearly saw a white and gold dress.
The author of the photo said that The dress is still blue and black, as a minority of voting participants saw it. The original photograph of the dress, in which its true color was clearly visible, was published a little later, when the whole world had managed to rack its brains in search of the correct answer and debates with relatives.
Why does everyone see a dress differently?
It turns out that the whole controversy is based on biological differences between people - different people saw conflicting colors in the photo because the light hit their eye photoreceptors differently. The human retina consists of two types of photoreceptors - cones and rods- the perception of color depends on which of them the light fell on. If one person's retina has more rods or cones than another person's retina, they will see the same object in different interpretations.
Simply put, some people have more rods on their retinas, while others have more cones - this is what made the dress multi-colored in the eyes of two such people. The brain automatically interprets colors; this process is invisible to humans. If you go into a dark room and stay in it for 30-40 minutes, then upon returning the color of the dress will change for him, regardless of what color interpretation he initially saw it in. This will happen because some photoreceptors will fail temporarily, and they will recover later.
Experts report that such color illusions happen to a person all the time, but he does not notice them. You can check the true color of an object in a photograph using an image editor program, for example, using Photoshop, turning on/off the controversial shades. Some people's eyes ignore blue shades in certain lighting, while others ignore yellow ones. If a person saw a black and blue dress in a photo, then his eyes ignore yellow shades, and if a white and gold dress - blue.
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A person’s eyes are not only his soul, but also a whole world of mysteries. Why do they say that people had not seen blue before, although the Egyptians used it to color their tombs and decorations? How do some people manage to see ultraviolet radiation, while others manage to distinguish 100 million colors at once? Does creative vision really exist? There are so many questions that modern scientists must surely have answers to.
We are in website decided to find out how the vision of different people differs depending on the way of thinking, culture, time and other circumstances. Be careful, after this article you can see the world in a new light.
Why did ancient people not distinguish fuchsia from white, but confused purple with blue?
10 thousand years ago, people saw colors the same way as we do, but used general names. Light shades were equated to white, dark shades to black. The fuchsia color was bright and light, so it stood on par with white or yellow. Purple and blue were similar and stood in the same row, equating to dark or black. Later, shades began to be distributed between red, yellow, green and blue-green colors (purple and blue fell into the category of blue-green color).
In speech, people described shades of color through context - the same way we explain taste today. The words “sweet”, “salty”, “sour”, “spicy” or “bitter” are often not enough to accurately convey the meaning, and we use qualifiers: compare, for example, the phrases “like a sour lemon” and “like sour coffee.” .
The ancient Egyptians saw the color blue, but the Greeks did not?
Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson noted that each color had a specific meaning.
For example, artists always depicted men with red-brown skin, women with light brown, and gods with gold, because they believed that the skin of gods and pharaohs was really made of gold. The exception was Osiris, who received black or green skin - a symbol of new life and resurrection. This underscored his story: he was killed by the god Set and resurrected by the goddess Isis to then rule the underworld.
Blue and light blue were the most popular colors among the Egyptians, they symbolized truth, righteousness, birth and life. The skies and waters of the fertile Nile were blue, fertility amulets and tattoos for women in the form of the god of Bes were often also blue. But the meaning of each color was inextricably tied to the context of the image.
This is more noticeable in the language of the ancient Greeks: when describing objects, they grouped them by qualities. For example, the sky was called bronze because it is dazzling, like a sword blade. The sea is purple-red, as is the wine, because they both symbolize freshness, life. But is it true that the Greeks did not distinguish the color blue?
Riddle: what did this ancient Greek statue originally look like?
Correct answer: option A.
Scientists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann have proven that ancient statues and public buildings are made in color. The pigments in the paints were mineral, but the medium itself was organic, so over time bacteria destroyed it and the paints crumbled. It turned out that our ideas about color minimalism in ancient times are far from reality. And, of course, the Greeks perfectly distinguished shades of blue, highlighting it as a separate category of color.
Based on research in 2007, American and German scientists developed an exhibition where ancient statues and buildings are presented in their original colors. It's hard to believe that hundreds of years ago ancient Greek craftsmen used such a variety of colors, decorations in the form of bronze inserts and bulging eye pupils made of black stone.
Even Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and educator of Alexander the Great, in his writings spoke about 7 primary colors: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue and violet. He associated them with 7 notes and the days of the week.
Today we name 11–12 main categories of color in the language, and this indirectly indicates the degree of development of society. There are also those who easily determine the slightest difference in shades of colors and use 10 times more definitions.
For example, "chartreuse", "lime" and "shamrock" are names of green-hued flowers that look like green or light green to most. You can check how sensitive your eyes are to color using this test.
No person can distinguish blue colors until they are a year old.
The study found that children aged 4 to 8 months were faster at recognizing a green circle on a blue background than a blue circle on a blue background. These findings present scientists with a new mystery: is the ability to recognize colors innate or acquired?
Some people see 100 times more colors than others. Count how many stripes you see:
Less than 20 strips: You may have 2 types of light-sensitive cones. Like 1/4 of the world's population. You see slightly fewer colors than most. Special glasses or applications designed for all types of color blindness will help you see the full spectrum.
From 20 to 36 strips: You most likely have 3 types of light-sensitive cones. You, like most people, distinguish a large number of color shades.
More than 37 stripes: It looks like you are a tetrachromat. They have 4 types of light-sensitive cones. Such people recognize approximately 100 million colors, like bees, some birds and the artist Concetta Antico, who creates such paintings:
The presence of 4 types of cones at once is a rare mutation and occurs among women who have men in their family with color blindness. But even people with the same eyes - twins - perceive color differently. The brain itself determines color depending on mood, emotions and memories.
How to describe a color if there is no name for it in the language?
Some people have noticed that we often use different names for the same color due to difficulties in perception. Remember the riddle with the dress: some considered it white and gold, others considered it black and blue.
The Yele language, used on the island of Papua New Guinea, has a different approach to defining color. Instead of a separate name, use the name of an object that looks the same under any circumstances. For example, the word “night” means black, “cockatoo” means white, “sap” means dark red, “immature” means green, “reef water” means blue.
But even this approach will not protect you from the illusions that your own brain deliberately creates. Look at the picture and tell me what color the circles behind the stripes are:
The thing is that they are all the same color. This is the Manker-White optical illusion. Because of the multi-colored stripes in the picture, it seems that the circles are 4 different shades. Think this is an easy task now? Try to answer exactly what color the hearts behind the stripes are:
Answer: They are all the same color - yellow.
Can you hear color or see time?
Yes, the neurological phenomenon of synesthesia is also a game of our mind. Synaesthetic people imagine that the letter “D” is certainly, say, blue, and the name “Alexey” can leave a bitter taste in their mouth.
Famous synesthetes included Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Liszt, Duke Ellington and Van Gogh. If you think you are also a synesthete, test yourself and take part in research to help science understand this amazing condition.
Incredible facts
Anyone with normal vision will agree that blood is red, the same color as strawberries or the planet Mars. But could it be that what we call “red” is, for example, “blue” for someone else? Just recently, any scientist would have told you that people with normal vision see all colors equally.
How do we see colors? The brain processes the light that hits the eye cells, and our perception of the color of that light is associated with a universal emotional response. But recent experiments have shown that, maybe we all perceive colors differently.
In other words, your blood is the color that another person would call blue, and your blue sky will be red to someone else. But our individual perception will not affect what emotions the color of blood or sky will evoke.
This phenomenon was demonstrated in experiments on squirrel monkeys, which, like colorblind people and most mammals, have two types of cones: those that are sensitive to green and those that are sensitive to blue. That is, for them, red and green wavelengths of light look neutral, and they cannot see red and green dots on a gray background.
Scientists from University of Washingtoninjected monkeys with a virus that allowed them to see red, as well as green and yellow. After this, the monkeys were able to perceive new information, despite the fact that their brains are not genetically programmed to perceive red signals.
Studies on monkeys dating back to 2009 showed that perception of light wavelengths is not predetermined. All this led scientists to believe that color is a personal feeling. When we are born, our neurons do not respond to color in a predetermined way, and we develop a unique color perception.
However, although we see colors differently, our emotional response to the same colors is universal. Regardless of what you see when looking at a clear sky, it is the short wavelengths of light, which we call the "blue" color, that have a calming effect on us, and the long wavelengths, that is, yellow, orange and red, which stimulate us. As scientists explain, our reaction to colors appeared so that all living organisms determine the cycles of day and night. So the dominance of blue light at night explains why we feel most tired at this time, and the dominance of yellow light in the morning is exactly what makes us wake up.
