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
Green consisting of yellow and blue is only true in the context of mixing pigments and doesn’t apply here. The cones of eyes measure (in extremely simplified terms) how close is the wavelength of light to some specific color – green, red, blue. The closer to this ‘baseline’ color of the given cone type the light is, the more it is stimulated. The wavelength of yellow is between red and green, and thus it stimulates both types of cones. This signal is what your brain interprets as yellow. You can, however, also get the exact same stimulus by mixing green and red light, which is why RGB monitors can give you more than three colors.
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