As I’m sure we all learned at some point (though can’t remember specifically when), color is created in our minds after being filtered through cones in our retinas. Obviously, our brains are much more complex than our eyes, so what does this mean for how colors are translated?
The simple answer is that when our eyes see two colors, one overpowers the other. For example, our eyes will either see blue or yellow, not a mixture of the two (and I’m not talking about green).
This blog explains the existence of so-called “impossible colors” — colors that are so alike others, but aren’t able to be picked up by our retinas. It also has .gifs worth checking out, that basically use colors burned into your eyes and transposes them onto other colors. That allows our brains to see two different colors on top of each other (not blended), and access these impossible colors.
The obvious issue this brings up is how to see these colors without those tricky .gifs? So far, there’s no answer for that. Down the road, sure, some scientists may invent a way to implant cones with less overlap, but as of now all we have are tricks we can play on the eye. Regardless, accessing these extra colors isn’t an immediate concern for science, but it will be interesting to see if one day in the distant future humans see far more colors in nature.
Personally I always thought we were able to see all the colors that we currently have names for. It doesn’t surprise me that there are colors out there that our eyes cant in fact detect but I find it hard to believe we can only see blue and yellow. Similar to the eyes, the ears can only detect certain levels of frequency. Many animals have the ability to detect higher or lower frequencies than we notice which means there are actually sounds around us everyday that we cannot even here while other animals and organisms can. Heres a chart than shows the different levels of frequencies that different animals can hear…http://www.dosits.org/science/soundmeasurement/soundshear/
Gabrielle — found it on a comedy website believe it or not (http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-facts-about-colors-that-will-change-how-you-see-world/). As you can probably see in the link, they list 5 really interesting things about color that most people wouldn’t really think about. I chose to write the blog about “impossible colors,” but another really interesting one is that in many cultures, blue and green are considered the same color. In a way, some countries don’t even recognize colors as common as those.
This is such an interesting topic, how’d you come up with it? Maybe if you added in a personal experience, or what made you think about it, it would be even better than it already is! After reading this blog post, I decided to research about this a little myself and I found this website (http://bigthink.com/big-think-tv/see-a-color-humans-cant-see) that teaches us how to do a trick, exposing a color that is not visible to the human eye. I wonder how long it’ll take before we’re able to see many more!
Its interesting and almost mind-blowing thinking about all of the colors that our eyes can’t detect. However, maybe our eyes can’t see the unknown colors because they are dangerous to our retina. Also, mabye in the past humans were able to see certain colors, but through evolution, our eyes became immune to them do to their harming frequency or other factors.