Another way of looking at it...

[REDJOHNNYMIKE]

Have you ever wondered what colors we can't see, or don't know we can see, or have simply never encountered before?

 

Think about it, our perception of light is limited by our imperfect biological makeup which can only view certain light, so with different eyes and neural processing everything would look completely different.

 

What do you think other colors look like? How would you describe them?

[Ztalker]

I have no idea how to describe a new color, sorry

 

Though, isn't is so that the colors we see might actually be different by perception? I always imagined something like in the D12 clip 'Purple Hills' kind of stuff.

[RC-1162]

i'd describe them as:

ooooooooooooooooh! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!

 

well, it sort of depends how similar it is to my favourite color (blue). and if it bears any resemblance to pink, i'll just walk off.

[Cygnus Q'ol]

It may not seem like a color at all to us with different optical sensors.

 

It may be more like some sort of brilliance or energy radiation, or the lack of.

(I'm getting images of the Aurora Borealis)

 

Perhaps movement may play a factor as well. It may be like an amplitude modulation and we'd only see the high or low spikes of that particular color. A change in output, higher or lower, would change the color.

 

...or perhaps it would appear within a rhythmic pattern (frequency modulation), where we would only see the highest output "thump" similar to a drum beat or pecussion resonance.

Higher or lower frequencies and speeds would change the output, thus our reception of it, giving us an unlimited array of visual info to process.

 

Interesting to say the least.

 

I must meditate more on this.

[Jae Onasi]

Ah, eyeballs--one of my favorite subjects. It's an amazing organ.

We're limited to seeing wavelengths in the visible light spectrum (390-780, to be more precise). Other animals, insects, etc can see into the infrared (wavelengths over 780) or into the ultraviolet (less than 390). We can't. So, I do know what colors we can see or not see.

A friend of mine who was red/green color blind (specifically the green cones), interestingly, could see into part of the UV spectrum--he couldn't really describe the color except 'it's kind of like violet, but more intense....'

My guess is colors in the infrared would be kind of reddish and those in the UV range would be sort of violet-ish, but since we have no way of perceiving them, we don't have names for them other than IR and UV. We'd have to come up with a name for that color.

Our eyes are geared to work with the dominant wavelength of light from our sun, though the average wavelength of sunlight is a little higher than the wavelength we're most sensitive to. If we lived on a planet with a very red sun or a very blue sun, undoubtedly our eyes would be sensitive to very different wavelengths.

The eye/visual system is unbelievably complex, and it's safe to say that what we know doesn't begin to equal what we still need to learn. The guys who got the Noble prize for Physiology in '81 (Hubel and Wiesel) got it for learning how cats see the orientation of a single line and how a clear picture on the retina is needed for the vision centers in the brain to develop correctly in infancy in order to have proper sight. That was considered groundbreaking research at the time. We've come a long way in 25 years, but our knowledge of how the brain perceives the signals that the eye sends to it is still quite crude.

[RC-1162]

well, for the IR and UV, we can just call the colours "dull red" and "intense violet" respectively

[Davinq]

Poor Cygnus, he can only see in shades of green (Assuming he is the One)

[St. Jimmy]

The sad thing is, I have actually thought about this befrore, Many times, since I was a kid, It troubled me, But obviously you guys are a lot more intelligent than me 'cause I never got THAT far into it! Yeesh, ah well, I guess we'll never know...

[Emperor Devon]

It is an interesting thing to think about. If you want something to boggle the mind, try and think of a completely new prime color. It's impossible. You'll never succeed.

[Mav]

Back in highschool we had a huge argument about the perception of color in my AP Biology class. I don't remember the details, but my teacher disagreed with what the textbook (and the know-it-all student) said and he had his own theory.

[Jae Onasi]

If you like technical discussions on eye physiology and color perception, read on. Otherwise, feel free to skip it.

 

Perception of color is determined in humans by the cones, or the color photoreceptors, in the retina. There are 3 kinds--red, green, and blue. Green and red are a lot more common than blue. The rods, which are the other type of photoreceptor, signal light and dark only and not color. They're much more sensitive to low lights than cones(which is why you don't see color as well as night) and get bleached out in brighter light. The cones need a lot more light in order to trigger their reaction, and so work well only in daylight/brighter light. When a light of a certain wavelength hits one of the cones, it will cause that cone to fire. If it's a green light, it'll make the green cones fire, but not the red or blue. That signal gets sent back to brain, and the brain processes it and says 'Hey, that's green!'. Different centers in the brain take a look at the specific patterns, and then decide 'that's a green leaf' and so on.

 

@Cygnus--frequency modulation wouldn't work with the way our eyes/brain are constructed. Patterns are processed by the brain, not the eye. We'd have to have a cone that's sensitive to some wavelength in the UV or IR. Light hits that cone, causes a chemical change in that cone, and that generates an electrical impulse in the cone that gets sent down the nerve to the brain (well, it's a lot more complex than that, but this hits the important points). It doesn't matter about how strong the signal is once the threshold is reached for the cell to perceive it. Let's say it takes 10 units of green light to make the green cone react. It doesn't matter if you have 10, 50, or a million units of green light, the green cone is still going to send the same signal because it's an off/on thing. You don't get a little response with a little green and a lot of response with a lot of green. It's either all or nothing. It acts like an on/off switch, not a rheostat.

 

Even if we could make cones that see in the UV/IR range and then transplant them, we still wouldn't be able to see the color, because the brain pathways (or wiring, for lack of a better term) was not created for that color, unless it happens before age 1 (and preferably earlier). You can have all the UV cones in the world, but if there's no wire to take the signal to brain, or if there's not nerve cells created in the brain to perceive the UV/IR color, we'll still be blind to that particular color.

 

Probably way more color physiology than you all wanted.

[JediKnight707]

Most answers to these things come straight to me, because I generally like to broad on these subjects myself. But, this one was different. I actually had to think (O_O). It got me thinkin' what if everyone sees color differently? We'd never know 'cause we can't take control of another person's bodily functions.

But what's really boggled my mind at times, is what if we can't see all colors, and we're supposed to not see them. Like a The Giver type thing, where we're intentionally held back from seeing (and hearing) certain things for sheer simplicity.

That train of thought led me to a similar problem Jonas (the main character of The Giver). He saw color, when everything around him was black and white, yet he didn't know what it was. We had a discussion in my Lang. Arts class last year, when we read this book, on what would happen if we saw color and tried to describe it to someone that had never seen it before. The only real answer we came up with is emotion. Like red is anger, blue is calm and sereneness, etc. What if you saw a new color? How would you describe it?

I also started thinking of maybe a Truman Show type thing. Where we've been held off from knowing things by an all ruling power. (But, this is somewhat off topic.)

[Cygnus Q'ol]

Fascinating!

 

@Jae Thank you for the optics lesson. I have never really studied biology to that degree. Very interesting stuff. It's pretty awesome how our body works.

 

@Danny ...and what's wrong with green?

Consequently, since I can re-write the program as I wish, sometimes I like to re-write the color scheme and see the program as you do.

 

...and sometimes even better.

For instance, occasionally I'll re-write what I see and eliminate the clothes of the people around me. That's can be really fun.

[Jae Onasi]

Most answers to these things come straight to me, because I generally like to broad on these subjects myself. But, this one was different. I actually had to think (O_O). It got me thinkin' what if everyone sees color differently? We'd never know 'cause we can't take control of another person's bodily functions.

 

Everyone does see color slightly differently. One of the tests we had to learn how to do was the D-100 color cap test. There's 100 caps with different colors on them and you have to line them up in order of the spectrum. It's a lot harder than it sounds. They're not pure hues, they're tints of the colors, so it's more pastel. While it's easy to sort out the blue caps from the red, it's much harder to sort out, say, the blue-green caps, because there's not much difference between an aqua with blue in it and an aqua with slightly less blue and just slightly more green in it. Jimbo used to tease me about seeing colors wrong til we both took the test and I got a 96 and he got somewhere in the 70's or 80's. He hasn't harassed me since. The people with red/green color "blindness" (it's actually a deficiency and almost never a true blindness) sometimes had green caps mixed in with the reds and vice versa. It was very interesting to learn what they were perceiving.

The slight difference in color perception is because there's a lot of variation in humans. There might be slightly different amounts of cones and percentage differences in the red/green/blue cones from eye to eye, and the wiring will be slightly different from person to person.

There are people who are born with no cones at all and so have true color blindness, which is extremely rare. They're also very sensitive to light because all they have to see with are rods, which don't need much light to work. I imagine trying to explain color to them is a challenge, but they can see variations of gray.

I would use music or maybe even smell to describe different colors myself if I had to describe color to someone who could see no color. Trying to describe visual things to a friend of mine who was blind from birth was hard. We had to use descriptors from the rest of our senses, because she could relate to sound and touch.

 

@Cygnus--I don't know the _entire_ body to that degree, but I did spend a lot of time learning about eyes/vision system. There's so much to know about the entire body that no one person could possibly begin to know about it all. I can't even claim to know everything there is to know about eyes. It's such a complex organ and there's new research coming out all the time so it's impossible to know everything about it, too, though I certainly know what I need to know for work and more.

[Cygnus Q'ol]

^^^Are you sure you don't work for the Tyrell Corperation?

 

...and have you seen any Nexus 6 lately?

[Jae Onasi]

^^^Are you sure you don't work for the Tyrell Corperation?

 

...and have you seen any Nexus 6 lately?

 

I had to go look that one up--it's been a long time since I saw Bladerunner.

[Sabretooth]

Yeah, I've thought about this numerous times, but all I say is

 

Since we have not seen it, it is impossible for us to try and guess how these colours will look like. Its like being in the unconscious, its completely different - away from our world. Maybe there are other colours in this world, maybe not. All that matters is, that till we get some cool neural implants (which I'm sure we won't), we have no hope of imagining alien colours.