[Closed] Blue didnt exist til modern times..

Yes, I was thinking "primitive morons" until I got to the bit about different shades of green. Fascinating.

Even after it was pointed out, I still found the outlier green square very difficult to see.

My colour vision is pretty good, years of colour-retouching scanned photos proved that, but I cannot tell the difference with those green squares; it may have something to do with the way the colour is reproduced on a touch-screen device, or just that example isn't the original, and the subtleties have been lost.
Still, it's an interesting subject, how can we know if the colours we see are the same for everyone?

My left eye perceives colour differently to my right eye so I'm fairly confident colour perception would also vary between people. No problem picking out the green square that was a different shade in that article either.

Very interesting, I didn't have any joy picking out the different green...

Was having a chat about something similar earlier~ it's crazy to think we're surrounded by so many elements of the electromagnetic spectrum that are beyond the senses we're taught~

Would that mean if we could find a way of describing them, we'd begin to be able to discern things that we currently can't?

(And if so, would it end up as an exercise in over-stimulation, with too much info for our brains to process)

Green traffic lights aren't green any more. Because so many men are red/green colourblind they're a greeny shade of blue. We're just conditioned to think of them as green. (Or is this just my massive over-simplification?)

My colour vision is pretty good, years of colour-retouching scanned photos proved that, but I cannot tell the difference with those green squares; it may have something to do with the way the colour is reproduced on a touch-screen device, or just that example isn't the original, and the subtleties have been lost.

May I ask whether you considered the option where your vision/perception is just not keen enough to discern the difference?

Excellent article, very interesting indeed. Thanks muddydwarf.

I personally think it's not just colour that everyone sees differently but shape,too. We learn to see by association so when our parents tell us that the shape in front of us is a cup then that is what we associate this perceived shape as. But what I perceive a cup to look like is probably quite different to you.

And if so, would it end up as an exercise in over-stimulation, with too much info for our brains to process

If it happened to you now then quite possibly. If it had evolved then highly unlikely.

I'm sure I remember reading that the reason life uses the "visible" part of the spectrum is that radiation in those wavelengths is abundant (e.g. microwaves are pretty rare and don't reflect well so less informative of the environment), has enough energy to excite electrons (for detection; longer wavelengths are really energy poor, detector would have to be massive and ultra sensitive) but not so much that it would damage the sensing apparatus.

In terms of evolution what would be the advantage of being able to detect these other forms of EM radiation? What would they allow an organism to do better? I'm struggling to think of examples (and it is a bit of a trick question). Maybe if we had evolved some kind of emitter at the same time for radio communication..........

I guess life has evolved to use the most useful forms of EM radiation in our environment.

Being able to see IR (heat) would be handy (in fact, don't some organisms already have that capability?

The other part of the chat I was having earlier is how the dog seems to sense I'm on my way home a few minutes before I arrive

(and no, I don't have a set routine and smelly though I may be, a few minutes in a car=a few miles in undulating countryside full of stench)

They always say children and animals are more sensitive...

Being able to see IR (heat) would be handy (in fact, don't some organisms already have that capability?

Insects can see in UV. Also, interestingly, birds can see the polarisation angle of light. So the same wavelengths we see, but they're getting additional info we don't get.

Interesting article....although worth reading the comments under it too as they are quite informative (not often that can be said about comments on an article on a news website!)

BigJohn - Member

Green traffic lights aren't green any more. Because so many men are red/green colourblind they're a greeny shade of blue. We're just conditioned to think of them as green. (Or is this just my massive over-simplification?)

I'm red-green color blind. To me, a green traffic light is a very light green, almost white. About as green as some streetlights that have a bit of a yellowish or bluish tint to them...

Apparently, I see the yellow one normally. And the red is very dark.

Edit - can't see the different green square but that may be colorblindness,

I'm colour blind which makes me lousy at differentiating colours but really good at spotting subtle differences in shade. Those greens are all the same on my monitor.

Ha ha! The observer changes the reality!

Of everything! 😀

I suppose colours only exist if you name them. Red is red - but scarlet is also red. But whether its a kind or red or a different colour to red is a language decision.

We call a Robin a 'Robin Redbreast' (it actually [i]is [/i] a 'Redbreast' - Robin is a nickname)

But a Robin's red breast in orange. We've had a name for the bird for longer than we've had a word for 'orange' so the colour we is as orange now used to part of what we called red previously.

Sound is cultural too - tell a Spaniard (for example) that dogs go 'woof' and they'll laugh their heads off. Mind you, its said that dogs have accents too..

That was an interesting read.

I asked my Greek colleague about ancient Greek (he studied it at School) and words for Blue and he came up with a couple, plus if you read the comments it's also mentioned.

Surprised myself, I actually spotted the Green square straight away and I'd say I'm pretty rubbish with shades ect.....

...Maybe I should think more seriously about that move to interior design 😉

There's a good bit about colour in Mouse Or Rat by Umberto Eco, an interesting book about the nature of translation and how concepts aren't necessarily communicable between languages.

Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mouse-Or-Rat-Translation-Negotiation/dp/0753817985

Excellent article but I must be one of the rare ones as seen the difference pretty much straight away.

"The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye."

Well thats wrong for a start. What about all those woad painted celts the Romans used to encounter?

And there are plenty of words in ancient languages for blue (or at least we transalate them as blue).

I believ the ancient Sumerians (who pre date Egypt) prized Lapzi Lazuli so much there was a large long distance trade in the stuff. The defining characteristic of lapis lazuli, the thing that makes it unusual, is that it is bright blue.

[i]Well thats wrong for a start. What about all those woad painted celts the Romans used to encounter?[/i]

Interesting. The ancient Egyptians were using the same plant, and it's not clear that Picts actually painted themselves with it, it may well have been political move by Ceaser to call them "painted" as it marked you out as barbarian, or the may have been using an Iron based pigment (possibly miss-described because of the difficultly translating colour differences in the ancient world that the article tries to explain!

Mind you, its said that dogs have accents too..

[url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-31159898 ]Dutch chimps at Edinburgh Zoo learn to speak in a Scottish accent[/url]

I think that the 'blue didn't exist' angle isn't quite right - a friend pointed out this article which suggested otherwise from way back in the Old Testament referecing 'Techelet' several times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/world/middleeast/28blue.html

And the article itself points out that ancient Egyptians used it too.

The point really is about the not being able to discern a colour if you don't have a categorisation/name for it which is interesting - a kind of unawareness colour-blindness.

FWIW, I can spot the green.

[i]The point really is about the not being able to discern a colour if you don't have a categorisation/name for it which is interesting[/i]

Yep, what we would confidently call blue, for a lot of ancient folk was a shade of green

I'm curious about the people who could spot the different green square - what colour did you perceive the dress to be?

(I couldn't spot the difference - white and gold)

Well durr...
[img] [/img]

I'm curious about the people who could spot the different green square - what colour did you perceive the dress to be?

[img] [/img]

Green of course 😉

<sigh> not trying to rehash the dress, just wondering if there's any correlation

Edukator - Troll

I'm colour blind which makes me lousy at differentiating colours but really good at spotting subtle differences in shade. Those greens are all the same on my monitor.

I'm slightly colour blind and the greens all looked slightly different to me. 😆

not trying to rehash the dress, just wondering if there's any correlation

It was a joke.

To answer your question though. Well the dress as was it designed to do depended on the background colours to what I seen.

This whole topic is fascinating; my students have been obsessed by the dress since last week.

The dress colour doesn't depend upon the background, because different people see it in different colours on the same webpage. I suspect it's based on individual differences in photo-receptor cells on the retina - we only have a relatively small number of blue-detecting cells (because we primarily evolved to spot the difference between red berries and green leaves?) and some people will have fewer than others.

I really struggle with blue/black/brown colours - I've had jackets that I was convinced were black but were actually blue and I'm sure our sofa is blue-grey but it's actually brown - and I always see the dress in that photo as white and gold. I'd guess that those who see it differently at different times have more of the blue receptors, but they don't recover quickly from use and so their perception changes over time.

It works in language too.

I knew a Finnish bloke called Ville. Some people pronounced the first letter as V, some as W. I asked someone else about this and he said that they were the same thing...

This gives an insight into why we sometimes find it so hard to make ourselves understood to French people. We are making sounds that we think are what we've heard or been taught and we're actually doing something completely different, we just don't know. The French however do, and to them we are mangling the language.

It works in language too.

There's something similar with, I think, Japanese where they literally don't hear any difference between two common English sounds (r and w, IIRC). If taught English from birth, they can, but not if left until after 3 or 4 years old. They can be taught to say the sounds, but never learn to hear the difference.

good moaning

Related:

Isn't it?

Cerise is a good one - it was a particulary virulent shade of pink 'till the 80's.
🙂
Teal & taupe only seem to have entered mass public consciousness recently.
Taupe was originally used to describe the colour of a mole (the legged type). 🙂

Colours which don't exist in nature (pink, for example) are still real to us - our brain can still define them as separate colours.
How we name them is a bit odd;
Names derived from a nature, a new name entirely or lumped in with the nearest match.

Lots of other things didn't exist before someone decided they should - mountaineering is a great example.

Colours which don't exist in nature (pink, for example) are still real to us

Flamingos 😉

Woad-n't ancient Celts know something about blue?

Someone needs to tell pigs they're not natural. Except for maybe certain ones like Tamworths.

[url= http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/color-pink-doesnt-exist-can-see/ ]Oh no it doesn't.... [/url]

They're not pink, honest!
We just see them as pink.

I just picked the link at random, btw.
If it turns out to be a miltant pinkist/anti pinkist front, don't blame me.

EDIT - a counterblast:
[url= http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/03/05/stop-this-absurd-war-on-the-color-pink/ ]Oh yes it does......[/url]

Pink doesn't exist, it's just the absence of green.