What is Color?
To understand what color is, we first need to understand what light is. Light, as perceived by humans, is simply electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between roughly 380 nm and 740 nm. Wavelengths below 380 nm and above 740 nm cannot be seem by the human eye. Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength just below 380 nm is known as ultraviolet radiation. Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength just above 740 nm is known as infrared radiation. The sun, black lights and fluorescent lamps are all sources of ultraviolet light. Heat is a source of infrared radiation, which is how thermal vision works.
Electromagnetic radiation between the wavelengths of 380 nm and 740 nm constitute light and the human color-vision spectrum. There is evidence that other animals, namely insects and birds, have a color-vision spectrum that extends further into the ultraviolet range. Evolutionary factors greatly influence the development of color vision in different animals and species.
Although the human color-vision spectrum is continuous, it can be broken down into discrete ranges of colors which are then labeled with specific names.
Surfaces gain the appearance of color based on their reflection and absorption of different wavelengths of light. A surface that reflects all wavelengths of light appears to be white. Conversely, a surface that absorbs all wavelengths of light appears to be black (and also heats up as a consequence of absorbing this electromagnetic radiation). If a surface does not reflect all wavelengths of light equally, it will appear as a color in the human color-vision spectrum.
Color Vision
Color vision is a highly-debated gray area that lies somewhere between physics and psychology. As we h...
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... apart. Be afraid to drive near me because I'm a bad driver.
I didn't feel so smart in kindergarten.
Between the color flash-card tests and the green suns I was apparently drawing with my crayons, kindergarten was not exactly the high-point of my life.
Thank goodness for those little brown spots on bananas!
They say that bananas go from being green to yellow when they ripen. To me, they go from being yellow to yellow, so I only trust the spots. Bananas rule!
That one game of soccer...
When I was a kid, I played in this one game of soccer where my team had green jerseys and the opponents had yellow jerseys. Somewhere in the middle of this game, the sun started shining in such a way that I could not tell the jerseys apart anymore. This was the worst game of soccer I've played in my life. I quit soccer and took up bowling. I showed them.
examines the effects of the colorblindness approach to achieving a post-racial society. Wingfield, a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of numerous books and articles concerning racism in America, focuses her research around the effects of the colorblindness ideology on individual cultures and social issues. This article appears in The Atlantic, a left-leaning news source, along with a collection of Wingfield’s other articles, mostly covering issues concerning racism and segregation in America.
...nd violet wavelengths are the shortest, and violet is the least visible to the human eye. These wavelengths are scattered throughout the day and caused by a redirection of the light-waves direction due to gas molecules in the atmosphere (Mc Knight, p. 84). When the sun is setting towards the end of the day there are few blue wavelengths left and we see orange and red which are dominant and the longest wavelengths of visible light to the human eye. At the bottom of the photo (closest to the setting sun) red and orange are the dominant visible colors with the occasional blue and almost violet. If our eyes could not see orange and red our sunsets would be a dark blue or black.
In this paper, I will argue that it is more likely that the qualia of colour could be explained by physicalism rather than by property dualism. Qualia are subjective experiences, such as our senses (pg. 3). Physicalism views every property as physical, and can be explained by science (pg. 29). Property dualism refers to the philosophical view that minds are made out of one substance, but contain physical properties, and a non-physical mind (qualia) that are not related to each other (pg. 29).
Another speaker, Margaret Livingstone delves into the visual aspect of our senses. Livingstone mentions how artists recognize things about vision that neuroscientists are not privy to until years later. Livingstone discussed the differentiation between color and lightness, and how the two contribute differently to a work of art. Color is thought of as “comparing activity” whereas light is thought of as “summing them.” Livingstone indicates that the visual system is subdivided into a ventral system and a dorsal system. The ventral system is responsible for object recognition, face recognition, and color. The dorsal system is responsible for navigating through the environment, special organization, and emotional recognition. The ability for humans to see distance and depth is carried via our colorblind part of our visual system. As a result, Livingstone concludes that one cannot see depth and shading unless the luminance is right to convey three-dimensional.
In the Radiolab episode “Colors,” Adam Cole hosts Jay Neitz, a neurologist and color vision researcher at the University of Washington, to discuss colorblindness in primates and humans. Neitz hypothesizes that the test they used to cure colorblindness in squirrel monkeys could also cure the same disorder in humans. Colorblindness is a genetic disorder that causes the cones in the eye to perceive colors differently. In the back of the eye lies the retina that holds three photoreceptor cells called cones. Each cone is sensitive to either red, green, or blue and when functional, allows the brain to process the different wavelengths of color. Humans and some primates have two genes on the X Chromosome that encodes visual pigments, one holds green
Colors of cretin things can appear different at some situations. For example, blood as we know it is red, that color that you see through your eyes of the blood in our veins is “red” but underwater, at 30 feet underneath the surface your blood turns, or rather appears green due to the light bouncing off of it is much less than it is at the surface as mentioned in the article “Did you know that your blood is green underwater?” by Fun Facts (see Article 2). These examples got me interested from the class discussions we had and how the philosophers viewed sense perception and the kind of thought they had of
Blue color blindness, also known as incomplete achromatopsia or blue-cone monochromatism, is an X-linked recessive disorder in which only the blue cones and the rods are functioning properly. A previously proposed theory states that signals from rods travel in the same pathways which carry signals from the blue-cones, making color vision in a blue-cone monochromat impossible. However, current research on blue-cone monochromats shows that signals from some rods and cones may be traveling by separate pathways to where wavelength discrimination takes place, making color vision possible in this type of monochromat, when both rods and blue cones are working simultaneously under twilight conditions. (6,7)
Different wavelengths of light determine what colors we see in fish and other organisms. For instance, the changes of season affecting length of daylight triggers many species in the wild to change into their extreme breeding dress. Scientific studies exhibit numerous reports of fish that faded in color after becoming blind, an observation that would have some implications for fish kept in the dark.
and can see just one color, and various shades of that color. This form is even
Light is both part particle and part wave. Light is “the electromagnetic radiation that may be perceived by the human eye”. It consists of photons, which are massless bundles of concentrated electromagnetic energy. Light’s lower frequency is red, and the higher frequency is blue. Like sound, light has frequencies humans can’t detect. Ultraviolet light is at a frequency higher than violet, and infrared is at the frequency lower than the red of visible light. We get UV (ultraviolet) rays from the sun, and infrared is used in night vision to see better.
However, categorical perception and its effects are not limited to auditory stimuli. As mentioned earlier, a categorical perception effect can also be seen in different kinds of visual stimuli.The perception of colors in a rainbow may be the most obvious example of CP. Even though a rainbow consists of many different wavelengths of visible light, observers only perceive distinct colors and not the full continuum of existing visible light (Goldstone, 2009). In addition to applying to relatively simple stimuli such as colors, categorical perception can also partially explain expertise in certain subject areas. Radiologists, for instance, are particularly skilled at spotting differences between X-Ray images. These experts have developed an ability to spot meaningful (cross-category)differences while minimizing irrelevant (within-category) ones (Goldstone, 1994). Categorical perception has also been demonstrated in facial expressions and basic shapes (Beale and Keil,
I went into my junior spring soccer season kind of sad, my past coach, wasn't going to be our team coach this year. I wasn't really depressed though, because I had tons of friends that were playing this year. One of the great things about soccer is that it is not a school-sanctioned sport. To me this said that I was able to play another season of soccer with my friends from Paonia and Hotchkiss without the normal High School rivalry between these schools. Year after year, the schools pulled pranks on each other, sometimes nothing big, but sometimes something big. I remember my freshman or sophomore year, when a few guys I knew went over to Paonia and painted their skylight in their commons. When the sun shined into the skylight, it reflected a big HHS onto the floor, talk about a cool prank, but hey they got a free vacation but the school had to pay a ton of money to clean it up.
During Bob Berman’s lecture, we discussed how perception is everything. Perception is how we see the world through our eyes. Colors cross each other to make certain colors, and our universe’s prime colors are red, green, and blue. The sky is blue because of the red, green, blue primary colors and when scattered naturally how they appear, it “robs” from incoming sunlight. The blue light got “robbed” from the sunlight making the sun look yellow, and having too much red and green. From outer space, astronauts have stated the sun is actually white as snow. The sun is actually a white star. To understand these color clashes even further, Bob Berman brought a green and red flashlight and pointed them at each other on a white wall. The colors then
It was determined that infants develop color vision at or around three months of age and that when final results were evaluated and compared to adult (only) measures, actually have better quality color vision (Brown et al., 1994). An interesting study by Chase (1937) made efforts to discover the identities of color in which infants that aged 2 to 10 weeks old were tested to find out what colors they could perceive. The results they came up with were that very young infants could tell the difference between the primary colors and combinations but there were numerous limitations to the study (Chase, 1937). The study had placed infants to lie down and view a screen while observing eye movements (Chase, 1937). Findings by Franklin, Pilling, and Davies (2005) explain that color categorizing occurs in four month old infants and adults alike. A study by Bornstein, Kessen, & Weiskopf (1976) has supporting evidence that color is categorized in 4 month old infants and determined the boundaries within...
Light is what lets you experience colour. The pigment of the retina in your eyes is sensitive to different lengths of light waves which allows you to see different colours. The wavelengths of light that humans can see are called the visible colour spectrum.