Colour- The Science Behind The Sense.

Ben Craven gave us an after hours talk on Thursday evening about colour: Usually done for primary school children Ben had padded out the sciencey bits so us university students could get learned. I felt like I was back in primary school as I wondered at all the experiment equipment Ben had laid out.  He’s a very interesting and intelligent man so I knew we were in for some good stuff.

His first claim- we are all colour blind. He demonstrated this by showing us two lighting boxes which our eyes perceived to be exactly the same colour. But when he placed a red pepper into the two boxes the pepper looked neon red in one whilst appeared dull and grey in the other. The two lights were in fact not the same colour, one was pure yellow light and one a mix of red and green. So we cannot differentiate between colours as colour is only defined by what we see in our brain. There is no objective reality to colour!

On the other hand 1 in 20 men would disagree that the two yellows looked the same – these are the people that are classified as being colour blind but there is no reason for saying that we are right and they are wrong- there’s just unfortunately less of them!

Another trick ben taught us was our brains cunning ability to detect the true colour of objects even in different lighting conditions, so we are still able to tell that a white square on a black and white checker board is white when its in shadow. It’s a clever trick our brain has developed to help us out. When you cut the white square and black square out of the picture and put them next to each other you realise the square we identify as white is in fact darker than the one we identified as black- CLEVER EH!?

However try and demonstrate the same principal in bizarre lights the brain isn’t used to – like the pepper example with red and green lights- and our brain can’t do it. It isn’t trained to process those lights.

The science behind how we process colour is pretty amazing. I've always found it pretty baffling ever since I started to wonder how anyone knows whether two people who call a colour the same name are in fact seeing the same colour. It’s possible they could have just be learnt to attach that name to that colour; for example I could see green but just call it red and no one would know the difference...confusing stuff! Maybe I’ll start to appreciate how much work my eyes and brain have to go through in order to see all the colours there are in the world.