eli5: Why is it impossible to imagine new colors?
In: 562
For a wonderful history of colour in society, art, and for cultures around the world, I recommend _Color_ by Victoria Finlay.
Is it? When I design things in my head that don’t already exist, I see a wire frame type thing in my mind. The color of the wires is not something I can describe but maybe sort of an electric pinkish-green. If I think of something that exists it’s the normal color.
As far as I can tell it’s just a color my brain uses when the actual color is unknown or irrelevant.
Edit: Something else sort of interesting. My brain has no trouble distinguishing the boundaries of those objects even though they are all the same color and have no real depth.
So we see all the colors that our eyes are capable of seeing. In this modern day, over the course of your life, you probably have seen close to all with different shades and what not. Some insects like bees can see in UV. We can’t though. But if we could, there would just be another color we would give a name to and added to the list. It might well be UV would look like a different blue. Same would happen if we could see infra-red. It would be just another common color. It would be interpreted by the brain as distinct from the other colors, but in the end it would just be another color. Infra-red would be a cool one to have as we could see much better at night with it. UV would change things as drastically though flowers would look a bit different for example.
It is worth noting that your brain interprets the data it gets from the eyes so that you see the colors in your mind. But whether “yellow” actually looks the same in your mind vs my mind, it would be impossible to say. There is definitely a color yellow, but what you see in your mind is a representation of the color.
Kind of off topic but three things semi related I want to share:
1. There’s a guy, I can’t recall if he’s a linguist or scientist or some sort, but he basically proposed the idea that it may be possible to describe color to blind people using our current lexicon but maybe we just haven’t found the right combination of words. I always thought that was kind of interesting.
2. There is such a thing as impossible colors. It has to do with, as you’d imagine, colors that just can’t exist to our eyes because of the way our rods and cones work in our eyes and the light frequencies of color. Something like that anyway
3. There’s a thought experiment called the black and white room or something similar that goes like this: a person is born in a room that is completely black and white. They live in that room, are served their meals through a slot by people covered in black and all their food is dyed black. The only stimulation they have is books about color and color theory, obviously also all in black and white. They read these books all day everyday. They eventually become the world’s foremost expert on color theory and how colors work, despite never having seen one. Who knows more about color, this person or someone who knows nothing about color theory and the way colors work but has seen colors? I may have fucked up parts of that but you get the idea.
One more thing kind of relevant: this is from that movie “what the bleep do we know?” And is probably bullshit but the idea is similar. So in the movie, not sure how they’d know this but regardless, a guy tells the story of when the first ships brought people to America or whatever it was at the time. He says that the native Americans could not see the veseles in the distance, although they could see movement in the water, because the idea of a vessel like the ships that were approaching were so foreign to them that they couldn’t even perceive them. But I guess the idea is kind of the same in that your brain can’t conjure up something it has no frame of reference for. There’s a lot of pseudo science stuff in the movie but I found it entertaining. It’s a lot about the multiple worlds theory of quantum physics and things of that nature and how basically you create your own reality and if you truly believed you were capable of certain things you could do them. Anyway sorry for the long post and the nonsense but there you go
Answer from someone who doesn’t really know!
Colors are really just different frequencies, so what constitutes different? If we were able to see colors outside of our current range they might not look like different colors so much as slightly different shades of existing colors and so slightly different we might not perceive them. Sure we can tell the difference between blue and red. But within what we see as red are an infinite number of frequencies that we would perceive as shades, not colors. And the finer the frequency change the harder for us to tell the difference.
So for example I would imagine that if we could see infra-red it would just look like a shade of red to us, not a completely different color. As the frequencies go up the smaller the difference.
But at same time, I have no idea.
Because our imagination is just our brain combining things we have seen before. Every combination of colors we have seen before. Plus it also depends on what you consider colors, because different shades could be considered new colors but we categorize them as shades and not colors
Brown is just dark orange. But English speakers don’t give light blue a separate name, while Russian speakers do — it’s as separate a color as orange is for us. OPs question is a language question, not a visual or perception question.
Is it impossible? I am imagining a color that has a bacony taste. I think that’s new.
But now what?
Isn’t it the case that there aren’t any new colors?
It’s not just impossible to imagine new colors
It’s impossible to imagine new ANYTHING
You can mix and match and take pieces etc
But you’ll never be able to imagine anything actually new
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