May have worded this poorly, but when you look at the color spectrum, it appears (to me, my thinking may be flawed) to be the primary colors red, yellow, and blue and their intermediates. Red to yellow with orange in the middle, yellow to blue with green in the middle, and blue to what would be red, with purple in the middle. Except there is no red at the end of the natural spectrum, just at the beginning. So is it just a nice coincidence that it wraps around perfectly?
In: Physics
That’s just your brain messing with you. When it sees red and blue light, but no green, the brain knows something is up because if it would be some color in the normal range between red and blue there would be some green in it. The absense of green tells the brain it has to be something else so it has to be purple.
A lot of how we perceive color depends on the brain and on what it expects to see.
Humans basically have 3 different types of receptors for light in different colors (with some overlap), usually called blue green and red (although that isn’t really accurate because each of them detects a range of colors and they have overlap) but based on how stimulated each of those receptors are, the colors will be interpreted. A strong signal on the receptors that react strongly to blue but a weak signal on the receptors for green and red makes it look blue, etc.
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