eli5: Why is it impossible to imagine new colors?
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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.
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