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.
- The vast majority of people are trichromats who can perceive about a million shades of color, but there are also dichromats who see fewer colors — as well as tetrachromats who can see a hundred million colors. But even if you can see those extra millions of colors, it’s a bit difficult to describe them to others in words. [url]
- Movie posters from 1914 to 2012 are mostly blue and orange. The distribution of colors isn’t too even, and the spread of the use of blue appears to be growing over time. [url]
- The color of food can really affect how it tastes. Red-colored drinks seem to taste sweeter for some people, and people are pretty bad at tasting flavors when the color of a drink doesn’t match its flavor. [url]
- Adults and infants may perceive colors very differently — with babies seeing colors directly, but adults seeing colors based on language interpretations. Interestingly, some Russian speakers may be able to see more shades of blue than English speakers. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: color, perception, senses, synesthesia, tetrachromats
Comments on “DailyDirt: Blue-Green Or Green-Blue Crayons?”
BLASPHEMY!
It’s clearly hot pink!
“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)
“Blue-Green Or Green-Blue”
Partly sunny or partly cloudy
Half full or half empty
Re: Re:
Rape or suprise sex?
Green-Blue forever
I have never forgiven the Crayola company for discontinuing the Green Blue crayon…
Re: Green-Blue forever
Same here. I have some broken bits of the green blue still. That was the best color ever.
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.
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I have wasted much time pondering this as well.
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Same here.
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“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”.
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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.
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.
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.
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… 😛
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.