You see colour using three different kinds of cones in our eyes, and these cones can be either red, blue, or green. So where does yellow come in? Green consists of yellow and blue – but how would you only see yellow and not the blue that would make it green?
In: Biology
The cones is our eyes are not tuned to just one wavelength but they just peek there. They get a bit of a response from wavelength above and below that.
The entire viable spectrum is covered.
Our brain figures out the rest.
If an S cone recognizes a bright light but M and L looking in the same reaction don’t, than our brain decides that light must be blue.
If all three type of cones see something with equal intensity it mus be white.
L and M cones have a huge overlap. It is only light that is very red that gets an reaction out of L cones but not M cones.
If both L and M cones react ( but not the S cone) than the color must be somewhere where the cones overlap, depending on the response that might be yellow.
Basically the brain compares the response of the cones and assigns that to a “color” that is we perceive as one in the middle of spectrum between the reaction from the cones.
Things get weird when we have s and L cones react but not M cones. The m cones are between the S and L ones spectrum wise. There is no single wavelength of light that would result in that reaction, our brain simply can make up colors that don’t correspond to wavelength of light, like purple.
The colors we see with out brains are just ratios of the reaction of the different cones in our eyes that only partially correspond with the actual physical reality of wavelengths of light, that we ‘see’
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