By Linda Conlin, Pro to Pro Managing Editor
A visual neuroscientist and an ophthalmologist have a blanket at their home, but they can’t agree on what color it is. (Visual neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience that focuses on the visual system of the human body, mainly located in the brain's visual cortex.) Ophthalmologist Dr. Marissé Masis-Solano says the blanket is blue, but her husband, Dr. Patrick Mineault, says it’s green. How do two eye and vision professionals resolve the disagreement?
The controversy prompted Dr. Mineault to investigate people’s perceptions of color. According to a recent article in The Guardian, he used AI-assisted coding tools to design a simple color discrimination test. The interactive test at https://ismy.blue/ shows shades of green and blue that become more similar as the test progresses. Participants select which color they perceive, and the results compare each participant’s perceptions with others who have taken the test. Dr. Mineault’s ‘green’ is blue to 78% of other participants. (My green was blue to 68% of participants, which I infer makes me more ‘true blue.’)
The article, “Do you see blue or green? This viral test plays with color perception” by Ben Thompson, explains that, aside from color vision deficiency resulting from missing or defective cone photoreceptors, the names of colors may be influenced by culture or language, and research has found that colors familiar to one culture might not have names in another. For example, the ancient Greeks had no word for blue. The English language has eleven basic color categories, while Russian has twelve, and a dialect of the Ivory Coast has only three, but the same colors are present everywhere. While the human visual system can distinguish about ten million different colors, they certainly haven’t all been named, and no one could remember them all!
Research for Smithsonian Magazine, The World Has Millions of Colors. Why Do We Only Name a Few? by Ted Gibson and Bevil R. Conway, The Conversation, proposed that color words are developed for efficient communication. The World Color Survey of 110 languages found that, in general, warm colors – reds, oranges and yellows – were communicated more efficiently than the cool colors – blues and greens – across all languages. Further research showed that language develops words for things people want to talk about, primarily objects. Consider that across cultures, backgrounds are sky, water, grass, trees, which are all cool colored. The objects that people want to talk about are warm colored as are people, animals, berries, fruits and so on.
With multiple theories and research on color perception, some questions remain, however. How much of what we call a color is perception, and how much is culture or communication? What is the true color of that blanket, and what does it matter if they both like it?
