One eye sees white, the other yellowish. Symptoms of diseases based on the sense of color

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A person’s eyes are not only his soul, but also a whole world of mysteries. Why do they say that people had not seen blue before, although the Egyptians used it to color their tombs and decorations with might and main? How do some people manage to see ultraviolet radiation, while others manage to distinguish 100 million colors at once? Does creative vision really exist? There are so many questions that modern scientists must surely have answers to.

We are in website decided to find out how the vision of different people differs depending on the way of thinking, culture, time and other circumstances. Be careful, after this article you can see the world in a new light.

Why did ancient people not distinguish fuchsia from white, but confused purple with blue?

10 thousand years ago, people saw colors the same way as we do, but they used general names. Light shades were equated to white, dark shades to black. The fuchsia color was bright and light, so it stood on par with white or yellow. Purple and blue were similar and stood in the same row, equating to dark or black. Later, shades began to be distributed between red, yellow, green and blue-green colors (purple and blue fell into the category of blue-green color).

In speech, people described shades of color through context - the same way we explain taste today. The words “sweet”, “salty”, “sour”, “spicy” or “bitter” are often not enough to accurately convey the meaning, and we use qualifiers: compare, for example, the phrases “like a sour lemon” and “like sour coffee.” .

The ancient Egyptians saw the color blue, but the Greeks did not?

Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson noted that each color had a specific meaning.

For example, artists always depicted men with red-brown skin, women with light brown, and gods with gold, because they believed that the skin of gods and pharaohs was really made of gold. The exception was Osiris, who received black or green skin - a symbol of new life and resurrection. This underscored his story: he was killed by the god Set and resurrected by the goddess Isis to then rule the underworld.

Blue and light blue were the most popular colors among the Egyptians, they symbolized truth, righteousness, birth and life. The skies and waters of the fertile Nile were blue, fertility amulets and tattoos for women in the form of the god of Bes were often also blue. But the meaning of each color was inextricably tied to the context of the image.

This is more noticeable in the language of the ancient Greeks: when describing objects, they grouped them by qualities. For example, the sky was called bronze because it is dazzling, like a sword blade. The sea is purple-red, as is the wine, because they both symbolize freshness, life. But is it true that the Greeks did not distinguish the color blue?

Riddle: what did this ancient Greek statue originally look like?

Correct answer: option A.

Scientists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann have proven that ancient statues and public buildings are made in color. The pigments in the paints were mineral, but the medium itself was organic, so over time bacteria destroyed it and the paints crumbled. It turned out that our ideas about color minimalism in ancient times are far from reality. And, of course, the Greeks perfectly distinguished shades of blue, highlighting it as a separate category of color.

Based on research in 2007, American and German scientists developed an exhibition where ancient statues and buildings are presented in their original colors. It's hard to believe that hundreds of years ago ancient Greek craftsmen used such a variety of colors, decorations in the form of bronze inserts and bulging eye pupils made of black stone.

Even Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and educator of Alexander the Great, in his writings talked about 7 primary colors: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue and violet. He associated them with 7 notes and the days of the week.

Today we name 11–12 main categories of color in the language, and this indirectly indicates the degree of development of society. There are also those who easily determine the slightest difference in shades of colors and use 10 times more definitions.

For example, "chartreuse", "lime" and "shamrock" are names of green-hued flowers that look like green or light green to most. You can check how sensitive your eyes are to color using this test.

No person can distinguish blue colors until they are a year old.

Less than 20 strips: You may have 2 types of light-sensitive cones. Like 1/4 of the world's population. You see slightly fewer colors than most. Special glasses or applications designed for all types of color blindness will help you see the full spectrum.

From 20 to 36 strips: You most likely have 3 types of light-sensitive cones. You, like most people, distinguish a large number of color shades.

More than 37 stripes: It looks like you are a tetrachromat. They have 4 types of light-sensitive cones. Such people recognize approximately 100 million colors, like bees, some birds and the artist Concetta Antico, who creates such paintings:

The presence of 4 types of cones at once is a rare mutation and occurs among women who have men in their family with color blindness. But even people with the same eyes - twins - perceive color differently. The brain itself determines color depending on mood, emotions and memories.

How to describe a color if there is no name for it in the language?

Some people have noticed that we often use different names for the same color due to difficulties in perception. Remember the riddle with the dress: some considered it white and gold, others considered it black and blue.

The thing is that they are all the same color. This is the Manker-White optical illusion. Because of the multi-colored stripes in the picture, it seems that the circles are 4 different shades. Think this is an easy task now? Try to answer exactly what color the hearts behind the stripes are:

Answer: They are all the same color - yellow.

Can you hear color or see time?

Yes, the neurological phenomenon of synesthesia is also a game of our mind. Synaesthetic people imagine that the letter “D” is certainly, say, blue, and the name “Alexey” can leave a bitter taste in their mouth.

Famous synesthetes included Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Liszt, Duke Ellington and Van Gogh. If you think you are also a synesthete, test yourself and take part in research to help science understand this amazing condition.

Why do people with autism see the world differently?

Human eyes and brains have evolved to discern colors in the sunlit world. Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths produce different colors. Light hits the retina at the back of the eye, where pigments activate neural connections in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that translates signals into images.

The brain figures out what color of light is reflected from the object that the eyes see, and separates that color from the color it considers “real.” “Our visual system is supposed to throw out information about lighting and extract information about the color that is actually reflected,” Neitz said. “But I've been studying individual differences in color perception for 30 years, and these differences in dress color perception are the most striking I've ever seen,” added the neuroscientist (Nitz herself sees white and gold in the photo).

Usually the color perception system works without failures. Humans have evolved to see in daylight, but light can change colors. The color of sunlight changes from pinkish-red at dawn and blue-white at midday to red at dusk. “Your visual system pays attention to these color changes and tries to discount some of the color shifts throughout the day,” said Wellesley College neurologist Bevil Conway. “Thus, people either do not perceive the color blue, and then they see white and gold, or, conversely, gold - and then they look at a blue and black dress,” the scientist concluded (he sees blue and orange in the photograph).

In other words, TJournal explains, in the case of a photograph, people mistake the light in the background for sunlight and conclude that the dress is in the shadow, which means its light areas should turn bluish. So, there is no pure white color, but our brain comes up with the whiteness of snow or a dress for us.

Others ignore the light in the background and see a blue dress. They call the gold fragments black because they remember that if you look at a black object in the bright sun, you can see gold. In addition, it is likely that some of the people who saw blue knew in advance about the real color of the dress, and because of this, the brain gave the correct answer. If you sample the colors of the dress in Photoshop, you find that the colors of the dress are bluish and greenish-brown.

Swiked posted a photo of the dress on February 25 asking what color it was. According to her, she argued about it with friends. She added that the dress is actually blue. Internet users quickly began to argue about this topic, and the hashtag #thedress topped the top Twitter trends in the United States. Joining the discussion were Kim Kardashian (white and gold), singer Kanye West (blue and black), singer Taylor Swift (blue and black) and David Duchovny (greenish blue). The Sony Play Station account in Australia also joked on this topic: “Introducing the new white and gold Dualshok 4 controller.” The manufacturer of the dress has already stated that for now only the blue version is on sale, but the white and gold version will soon be available for sale.

Which seemed white and gold to some, and blue and black to others, as a new controversy began on social networks. Briton Nicole Coulthard posted in Facebook a photograph of Vans sneakers and said that she and her friend saw the color of shoes differently: one sneaker was gray with turquoise laces, and the other was pink with white.

In the editorial office of The Village, ten people voted for the color gray, and only three saw pink. For some, the color of their shoes changed by the end of the day. In fact, the sneakers turned out to be pink.

To stop the debate, we talked to an ophthalmologist, a psychologist and an artist and figured out why people see colors differently and what influences this.

Svetlana Snytko

General Director of the Center for Therapeutic Ophthalmology, ophthalmologist

The reason for different perceptions of colors is impaired color vision. These violations can be established using Rabkin tables . Color perception depends on visual pigment; this indicator is most often congenital, but can also be acquired - after injury or neuritis.

Rabkin's polychromatic tables are used to identify color blindness. According to the degree of color perception, they are distinguished: trichromantics (normal), protoanopes (people with impaired perception in the red spectrum) and deuteranopes (people with impaired green color perception).

Sergey Klyuchnikov

psychologist, director of the center for practical psychology

The perception of color is influenced by living conditions, the person’s current state, professional training and the general condition of the visual organs. Physiological causes include visual defects, such as color blindness, as well as situational mood. In a gloomy mood, a person reacts to dark shades, and in a positive mood, the picture for him becomes sunny and cleaner.

Sophistication in identifying colors also plays a role. This aspect may be related to natural conditions or special training. Northern peoples who live in Chukotka or Alaska distinguish much more colors of snow, since the success of hunting and survival depend on this. Professional education also plays a role: artists have a sharper palette of perception.

It is enough for an ordinary person to see approximately, and he already draws a conclusion about the picture. Due to the visual culture that has now befallen us, the array of color information, people no longer recognize shades, they define them rather by shape. Color has ceased to be an indicator in our conditions.

Mikhail Levin

artist, curator of the Pre-foundation Art & Design and Contemporary Art programs at the British Higher School of Design

From the point of view of the emotional perception of color, it is influenced by cultural background, social status, and upbringing of the vision of color. People associated with creative activities are distinguished by their observation of colors. When a person is constantly in contact with this, he sees color more sensitively and deeply and places accents more strongly.

In order for a color to be perceived calmer or, conversely, to cause an emotional outburst, a certain harmony of colors is created. And this combination can just influence perception. The same red can be perceived differently depending on the color around it. There are scientific works by Joseph Albert about tools for influencing the perception of colors.

Perception also varies depending on the conditions and location. This is why artists always work in daylight - colors are perceived better in a natural environment.

These experiments with a dress and sneakers look like some kind of illusory trick. I think this is because the image is shown digitally. The human eye reacts differently to images on the screen. There are settings that you can use to adjust color rendering. For some, it is more suitable when the color is more saturated, but for others, high contrast begins to hurt the eye.

Again, about cultural perception: a parallel can be drawn with. For a person raised in Japanese culture, a riot of color is typical, but for a European it is not. Many of my students complain about this exhibition as a painful experience: some even get headaches. We are simply not used to perceiving such intensity of colors.

The owner of the dress decided to ask Internet users for opinions about its color after she discovered similar disagreements among her loved ones. The answers turned out to be diametrically opposite: from blue and black to white and gold. At the same time, it is difficult for someone who sees the outfit as dark to believe that the “opponent” is not joking and actually sees the clothes shown in the photo as light (and vice versa).

A photograph with a corresponding question immediately flew around the virtual space. Even the stars gave their version of color perception: for example, Kim Kardashian saw a white and gold version, Lady Gaga spoke in favor of blue and sand, and Taylor Swift is sure that the dress has blue and black colors. In just the first day of publication on one of the sites, BuzzFeed, the photo received 28 million views.

It is now known for sure that the dress is made in dark colors (this was shown both by analysis of the photograph using professional photographic tools and by the confession of the owner of the “controversial clothing”), but for those who see the dress as light, it is still difficult to believe it. Scientists have explained the reason for this optical illusion.

The system of color perception was developed in humans during the process of evolution. We have developed daytime vision, in which we distinguish all elements of the surrounding world, including color. Light enters the eye through the lens, hitting the retina at the back of the eye. Waves of different lengths differently activate neural connections in the visual cortex, which translates signals into images. Night vision allows us to see the outlines and movement of objects, but their color range is lost.

However, even in daylight, color perception is not always unambiguous: in different lighting conditions, the color scheme of an object is perceived differently, and the brain also takes this into account. The same color may appear pink-red to us at dawn, white-blue during the day, and red at sunset. The brain makes a decision about the “reality” of color, in each case making allowances for related factors.

This is what explains the difference in the perception of the same image by different people. Those who mistake the light in the background for sunlight assume that the dress is in shadow, so its light areas are obviously blue. For some, in the same bright lighting, it is more common to see the whiteness of the dress. This is the most common version.

However, the brain of about 30% of people does not take into account the light in the background at all - in which case the dress appears blue to it, and the gold fragments then “become” black. Each person has his own visual experience, his own level of concentration, his own specific eye movements. The level of lighting in your own environment, the color scheme of objects that the brain recorded before switching attention - all this taken together makes a difference in perception.

Scientists have known this factor for a long time. But fundamental scientific knowledge itself does not attract such wide public attention: this became possible only during the period of widespread development of the Internet in combination with an interesting topic for discussion. Washington State University neuroscientist Jay Neitz told Wired.com that he has been studying individual differences in color perception for 30 years. According to him, the current example is the most revealing in all the years of his research. By the way, Neitz himself sees the dress as white and gold.