Colour Perception

This is about colour perception, literally. It's not at a metaphor, it's nothing to do with race it is about the physics, biology and philosophy (perhaps) of perceiving colour. I don't understand it, do you?

Category:

Education

Tags:

• colour perception
• color perception
• mantis shrimp
• Mantis Shrimp
• red
• green
• blue
• orange
• yellow
• rainbow
• spectrum
• Newton
• theory of light
• theories of colour
• Colors
• shades
• visible light
• infra-red
• ultraviolet

[iMaDeMoN2012]

Neuroscience is fascinating to me, I wish I had time to pursue a degree in it. Color itself is just perception. Humans have only three color receptors and therefore the visible colors are limited by the combinatorial of those three. The external source of color is light which is continuum but light receptors are discrete (only light of a certain band will fit). The relative concentration of light that fills those bands is interpreted by our brains into gradation. TMK

[MartinJWillett]

@iMaDeMoN2012 Fine, but is it possible to imagine an invisible colour? If yes how could you describe it to me? Do animals which can perceive different colours imagine more colours or are the colours we can see the only colours which are imaginable by any brain and they have to parcel them out across a different range of frequencies? What we see as red is to most deep sea fish an invisible colour - infra yellow, a mythical colour beyond their perception, but could they imagine it as red?

[makkathran]

Take a digital camera and point it at the lens of your TV remote while pressing any button on that remote. You'll see a purple-violet colour being emitted from the remote on the camera screen, but when looking directly at the remote you will see no light. What you see is ultraviolet light being relayed to you by the camera (which can detect ultraviolet) in the form of visible light at the highest visible frequency (violet)

[MartinJWillett]

@makkathran Aren't remote controls infrared not ultraviolet? Most old school video cameras can see very well in infrared so need filters to prevent unwanted effects, remove the filters and you can create cheap night vision equipment.

[makkathran]

Human brains are more or less all the same in terms of what frequencies of light we can detect. The evolution of the eye meant our frequency range has broadened so we can detect frequencies in between the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums (a TINY fraction of all known frequencies). Frequencies that are not visible to us will have a 'colour', but we can not detect them because our eyes did not evolve that way.

[MartinJWillett]

@makkathran This has not addressed the issue of colour. We can only imagine colours that we can see. Is that because we can imagine all the colours that are imaginable and we parcel them out among the frequencies our eyes can actually detect? We know other colours exist, we know other animals can see them, but what colour do they see inside their brains? Is a bee's ultra violet simply our violet and our violet they see as blue or is bee purple a colour which can be imagined as a distinct colour?

[33Crazydude]

Light is finite, but primate evolution has allowed humans the ability to interpret different waves lengths to a certain point.

Other animals can use light more efficiently than we humans and eagles have polarised light vision.

I’m surmising that our eyes take in and read Electromagnetic radiation and our brains convert this information into the appropriate Colours.

I’m pretty sure colour doesn’t exist, but simply an interpretation of our brain.

[mydogbanjo]

@iMaDeMoN2012 Generally speaking you are right, however I'm color blind to some reds and greens so I would perceive them differently than someone who is not. A bats brain is wired for sonar location and my in fact "see" sound. It gets interesting when the brain starts to interpret one sense in a form normally associated with another sense. We know for instance that chemicals, (drugs), distort senses and the perception of time and space. An interesting topic for speculation!

[makkathran]

@MartinJWillett I was gonna type infrared, but put ultraviolet down because the light looked violet-ish. I knew it was either of the two, but yea, I guess ultraviolet lens may be problematic.

[iMaDeMoN2012]

A better question, do all humans perceive green the same way? I say yes. Perception is not relative it's like television. It's an exact science. Our brains are built to produce a particular image, change the brain or the detectors, you change the image.

It appears only radiation, particularly electromagnetic radiation, is sensitive enough to be formed into images so any source of radiation or reflectors of radiation is visible and could have particular color given a detector.

[mydogbanjo]

@makkathran Ha ha....I'm jesting at the same time I'm commenting about interesting things. Actually the Hulk looks green for the reasons you stated but that doesn't explain why he turns green in the first place. And if you study some of the theoretical physics out there you would indeed begin to think that there may be gravity waves separate from the electromagnetic spectrum. Actually gravity is still a huge mystery and M-Theory explores it a wee bit! Cheers!

[makkathran]

@MartinJWillett So you're getting at the nature in which we perceive colour. If other animals perceive more or less colours than humans, then I would think, for example, 'human green' would appear different to them as the object reflecting green to us may also reflect ultraviolet, infrared, xray, radio, gamma , etc. Nearly everything reflects infrared. We can not perceive infrared, but if other animal can (in addition to visible light) then infrared would mix with other colours.