How do we know the exact color we see when we close our eyes? (Eigengrau #16161D)
In: Other
That color is just ambient light filtered through eyelid-flesh, so you could put a photoreceptor of some kind under a cadaver’s eyelid, and take a reading. If the receptor was comfortable enough you could even take the readings from living people. The cadavers’ blood distribution might be a little different so live readings would be a smidge more accurate.
Eigengrau isn’t the color you see when you close your eyes, it’s the color you see in total pitch blackness whether you have your eyes open or closed. Basically that fuzziness you see if you are in a room with no windows and absolutely no light. It’s caused because your perception of brightness is based on the difference between light and dark areas, and with no light areas your retina starts to pick up just random fluctuations in your light sensitive cells.
The color isn’t exact either, it’s just an approximate that people agree based on what they remember pitch blackness looking like.
I’m not aware of any reliable source that insists that Eigengrau is *exactly* #16161D.
But it wouldn’t be a hard experiment to do. Just put an optical device on somebody’s head that exposes them to a particular colour, like the headgear you wear at an optometrist’s to measure your eyesight, and see what they say when the light goes on and off. Adjust the colour until they say “yeah, it’s about the same”.
>How do we know the exact color we see when we close our eyes? (Eigengrau #16161D)
Just as some musicians have perfect pitch: the ability to match the frequency of a tone from memory against one that is played live, some people will have “perfect color” (the ability to match colors by memory).
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