I imagine there was a gradual process of discovery and little by little we learned more about the way we process light and send it to our brains. But I’m still having a really hard time understanding how we even started to question how many colors we see in the first place. Would really appreciate an explanation.
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It is possible to quite accurately recreate every color in a laboratory. Not just combinations of the three primary colors. You can then show two colors to someone and ask them if they see a difference. If you show them two different colors that they are not able to distinguish between then you know their cones have the same response to those spectrum. Based on their response you can then find out how sensitive each of the cones are to different frequencies of light. This not only works on humans but also other animals.
First we discovered that we have two different types of light receptors, rods and cones, by dissecting retinas and examining them under the microscope.
we were able to figure out that rods were responsible for low light, black and white sharp details and cones responsible for color vision by analyzing which parts of the eye are more sensitive to different types of vision, and comparing them to wear cones and rods are most dominant.
And after that, to answer your question, we found out that we have three different primary colors that we see because we we’re studying rods and compare chemistry and we realized they have three different chemical receptors in them, each of which response to a different frequency range of light.
there actually are a very rare number of people that have four rather than three different photoreceptors, and those people can see a wider variety of colors as a result. they don’t have a wider range of colors, but are able to distinguish between two different colors that look basically the same two people with just three photoreceptor colors.
Sir Isaac Newton spent a good amount of time putting needles in his eyes and found that when he would push on different areas of his retina he would see different colours.
Obviously better techniques have since been discovered but I believe this is the first “discovery” of colour rods.
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