eli5: Why is it impossible to imagine new colors?
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Colors basically correspond to a specific point (wavelength) within the visible spectrum of light. It’s a dot along a path – and every possible dot is already mapped out so nothing new can be found.
Our brains kind of imagine non-existing colors all the time. Pink and brown don’t exist in the way we think of them. We can’t see a mix of green and red, so it comes out brown in our brains. Pink is a mix of red and purple light.
“Light consists of electromagnetic waves, and colour depends on the wavelength. If colours were simply a naming scheme for wavelengths then pink is not one, because it is made up of more than one wavelength (it’s actually a mix of red and purple light). If you took a laser and tuned it across the visible wavelengths, from infrared through to ultraviolet, you would not pass pink on the way.”
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-pink-a-real-colour/
Everything you “just know” about color, you learned by having human eyeballs. And human eyeballs turn out to have some weird biases.
Your eyeballs detect color with three kinds of color sensors (cone cells). Each kind responds to different frequencies of light. [But they’re not evenly spaced on the spectrum.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell#/media/File:Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb-spectrum.svg) Two kinds of cone cell (M and L, in the picture) mostly detect red-green light, overlapping with one another, but with slightly different strengths. The other one (S) detects blue and purple.
And which color you *perceive* depends on the *differences* between these cells’ response, in what’s called an “opponent process”. The M and L signals, *taken together,* tell you how red or green something is. The S signal tells you how blue or purple it is. That’s why the most common kind of colorblindness is *red-green* colorblindness. That’s what happens when someone’s M cells or their L cells don’t work.
The color signals from your cone cells, plus the brightness signal from your rod cells, are combined in your brain to make your sense of color vision. Those signals are all your brain has ever learned about what it is like to perceive color. That’s the whole space of color that you can ever see with the kind of eyeballs that you’ve always had.
This is an amazingly inaccurate question. There are many designers who work with mixing colors to create new ones. They are frequently issued to the public in color palettes.
I had a dream once where the sky was a mixture of bright blue and violet-brown but I have no way to describe the color of violet-brown to anyone. And in this dream many flowers that shouldn’t have had spots in patterns on them like daffodils in the a bit more shimmery and “darker” violet-brown somewhat like spots on a banana.
So I can imagine the color but I don’t have words to convey it and have no way to show it to people.
Light is made of different wavelengths, which are like different strands. Your eyes can only see certain strands, and since there are only so many strands, we have seen all the colors you can make with those strands.
There was a story about some people trying to near OD on vitamin A2 so they could see infrared, but it would just look red to them as it’s still stimulating the red photopigments.
You can’t imagine a color you can’t see because color isn’t real, it’s you’re brain interpreting signals as a ‘color’ it assigned to them. We can’t even be sure that another person sees any color the same way my ‘red’ maybe looks different to someone else’s, but can be identified as ‘red’ by them.
There is at least one person found with an extra photoreceptor and they just seem to see the same thing, but are able to more finely identify differences in color.
There’s also glasses for the color blind that somehow let them differentiate the color they can’t see.
Everybody’s in here explaining how your eyes and brain distinguish existing colors, but none of that explains why you can’t imagine new ones. So here’s why:
Because your imagination is limited.
Your mind builds new ideas out of blocks that it’s already familiar with. The most imaginative things humans come up with are all framed around things they already know. Some ancient human asks “where did we come from” and answers it by analogy: we create things, so something created us. And then they ask what that something is and fill in the blanks with the familiar. Gods look like the humans who believe in them. Future technology is built on known phenomena harnessed and controlled and refined. A telephone that fits in your pocket! A spacecraft with gravity like Earth’s!
You *cannot* imagine something you have no basic conception of. If I ask you to, you’ll fill in all those unknowns with familiar analogues, but that’s not imagining something new. It’s imagining something old and considering how the unknown might be similar.
Put in a fairly direct example, imagine that you are solving an incredibly complex math problem far beyond your own capability. Now, *imagine* that you are someone far smarter. Someone capable of solving the problem with ease. You can picture confidence, calmness, and the satisfaction you’d feel after arriving at the answer, but the real process of solving it remains outside your grasp. Because your imagination is limited by your (lack of) knowledge.
“What would someone smarter than me do in this situation?” You can’t know, because you’re not a person smarter than you.
So back to colors. The color wheel you know is a more or less exhaustive documentation of known colors humans are capable of distinguishing. You can say “imagine what it would be like to perceive infrared,” but you have to imagine that by analogy with what you know.
And what you know is the color wheel. An attempt at an *exhaustive* documentation of the colors humans can perceive.
[[Edit: It occurs to me you might not be talking about colors *outside* the spectrum of visible light and instead mean new colors within it. But the spectrum is a visual representation of the whole (or a rough attempt at it). Imagining something “new” within that is just an impossibility. By comparison, imagine that you had somehow created an exhaustive list of all possible equilateral shapes. From a triangle to a square to a pentagon to a pentacontagon all the way through to a perfect circle. And then ask why you can’t imagine a shape with a “new” number of sides.]]
Basically the same reason you can’t imagine a new number – by defining what it is you already sort of categorised every possible one as known.
What our brain understands as color has a finite range of possibilities – whatever combination of signals our eyes can send. If something can be made of those signals its an existing color. It could be a color with interesting properties (like number pi) or one noone ever really thought about before (maybe due to being weirdly specific like 5.412786437906435743), but because it is a color its not a new one.
The paint counter gal told me they have 130 varieties of ‘white’. Who knew?
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