DailyDirt: Blue-Green Or Green-Blue Crayons?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Human perception can be pretty strange sometimes. People with synesthesia experience some mixing of their senses, so that they can hear colors or taste colors. But the English language even contains some interesting phrases to describe various feelings, such as "green with envy". Here are just a few more interesting examples of sensory perception. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
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Filed Under: color, perception, senses, synesthesia, tetrachromats


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2012 @ 5:14pm

    BLASPHEMY!

    It's clearly hot pink!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2012 @ 5:35pm

    "The vast majority of people are trichromats who can perceive about a million shades of color, as well as tetrachromats who can see a hundred million colors."

    Note tetrachromats are rare and not just Women, despite the fact that they have always claimed to see shades of colour that most men struggle to pretend to agree to seeing a difference in.
    (this could just be me)

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    abc gum, 17 Jul 2012 @ 6:09pm

    "Blue-Green Or Green-Blue"

    Partly sunny or partly cloudy

    Half full or half empty

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
      identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2012 @ 6:30pm

      Re:

      Rape or suprise sex?

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2012 @ 6:16pm

    Green-Blue forever

    I have never forgiven the Crayola company for discontinuing the Green Blue crayon...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2012 @ 11:00pm

      Re: Green-Blue forever

      Same here. I have some broken bits of the green blue still. That was the best color ever.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Rekrul, 17 Jul 2012 @ 8:35pm

    I may be exposing my ignorance here, but I've always wondered; How do we know that everyone (well, the majority anyway) sees the same colors? I mean, a person's only outside reference for what a color is supposed to look like is what they've been told that it is. How do we really know that everyone sees the colors of the spectrum in the same order?

    You've been taught that the sky is blue, so when someone shows you a blue crayon or blue paint and asks what color it is, you say "blue" because it's the same color as the sky. But what if the color you see when you look up is the color I see as yellow? Maybe someone else sees green. But since they've always seen that, it's perfectly normal to them.

    Take a prism and shift it a little and the color of the light passing through it changes, so what if there are minute differences in the 'prisms' of people's eyes/brains that cause them to see the same range of colors, but in a different order.

    If this were true, there would be virtually no way to verify it, since there's no way you can ever see through someone else's eyes.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      fb39ca4 (profile), 17 Jul 2012 @ 9:07pm

      Re:

      I have wasted much time pondering this as well.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      abc gum, 17 Jul 2012 @ 9:22pm

      Re:

      "How do we really know that everyone sees the colors of the spectrum in the same order?"

      What the brain "sees" as a color may differ but the order will be the same. We see a particular color due to its frequency, if that frequency changes so does the color.


      "the color I see as yellow? Maybe someone else sees green. But since they've always seen that, it's perfectly normal to them."

      Exactly


      Which way is up and which is down?
      The image projected upon your retina is inverted due to the convex lenses in your eye, your brain compensates for this and you end up seeing things "correctly".

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Rekrul, 20 Jul 2012 @ 7:41am

        Re: Re:

        What the brain "sees" as a color may differ but the order will be the same. We see a particular color due to its frequency, if that frequency changes so does the color.

        OK, maybe I worded that a little awkwardly. What I meant was that when one person looks at the spectrum, they might see;

        ROYGBIV

        And when another looks at it, they might see the colors;

        GBIVROY

        Seeing green where the first person sees red and so on. But since they've been taught that "red" is the first color, whatever color they see in the first position becomes "red" to them.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 17 Jul 2012 @ 9:00pm

    CIE Standard Observer

    The CIE XYZ colour space was defined in 1931 in terms of the colour sensitivity of the eyes of a “standard observer”. This was an average of measurements of a bunch of individuals—I can’t find an online reference for how many, but it might have been a few thousand.

    So it’s long been known that colour perception varies between people.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    JJJoseph (profile), 18 Jul 2012 @ 1:49pm

    Poster colors

    The predominance of some colors in movie posters is no surprise to painters. Some colors are way more expensive than others. Red ink, for example, is horrendously expensive, so poster printers avoid it if at all possible.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Michael Ho (profile), 18 Jul 2012 @ 4:38pm

      Re: Poster colors

      Interesting theory... but do poster printers charge marketing agencies by the amount of colors they use? Coca-cola must be spending a lot on billboard ads... :P

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        JJJoseph (profile), 18 Jul 2012 @ 10:57pm

        Re: Re: Poster colors

        @Michael Ho:"do poster printers charge marketing agencies by the amount of colors they use"

        Film studios don't do posters any more, but they used to charge more for red. Hence the palette was limited. Coca-cola didn't do movie posters.

        link to this | view in chronology ]


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