Do we all see colour the same way?

Factual Questions
1

After seeing another thread relating to describing colour to a blind person (you’ll have to excuse my spelling of colour - it’s correct where I’m from),a question jolted loose which I’ve long pondered… to whit; do we all perceive colours the same way?
I mean, when I see a fire truck I say “it’s red”, which is of course true to me. Now let’s say when my friend looks at the same truck, his vision causes it to appear what I would refer to as green, however, as he would have always known this colour to be called “red” he would, of course, agree that the fire truck was indeed “red” (stay with me now)
My point is that because there is no possible way of describing our perception of colour as an absolute, how do we know that colours are universally perceived? How do you know that your version of what’s blue and my version of what’s blue are not two totally different things?

For those of you still with me, any thoughts?

2

I’ve often heard that we probably don’t see the same sense imagery when we see a color and I never buy it. We have specific emotional associations with different colors and if we really did not share the same subjective ‘red’ we would not also share the same subjective feelings about the color red. I also don’t believe color feelings are a product of society, our consensus about colors had to come from somewhere.

Also what about color combinations, specific colors have to be created when combined. You may be witnessing the same wavelength but blue and yellow look like they would create a green. If your color perception replaced blue and yellow with something else they wouldn’t look like they would create a green. Unless of course your version of color was consistant in a way that was convincing, but if its all random why the consistancy?

I think you can carry this to any sense. Are our shapes the same? Maybe you see squares where I see triangles and your hand only seems to outline a square. Maybe you feel pain where I feel pleasure. I think these examples show how silly the color question is. The human brain and nervous system develop consistantly in all types of humans and we should interpret sensory information consistantly too.

3

well people who are color blind see different that people who are “normal.” The color blind test with the different cards is interesting if you’ve ever seen it. Basically people who see colors will see a number like 7, but people who are colorblind will see a number 4.
Also I read somewhere that men have less color receptors in the eyes and more black and white receptors when they are compared to women.

4

Well, we did cover this extensively before, you might search here as Im too lazy to.

5

“Do we really see colour the same way?” Everybody with even the slightest philosophical bent discovers this question when they first become aware that life has some built-in mysteries.

Needless to say, somebody who has the most common kind of colour-blindness does not see red or green the same way most people do. But I realize that that’s not really what you were asking.

My personal opinion is that none of us “really” see colour the same way, but the weight of “concensus reality” makes the point moot.

You may ask WHY I feel that we don’t see colour the same way. Well, my sisters and I can hear frequencies up to about 30 KHz, whereas most people max out at 20 KHz. My hearing has become more “normal” as I age, but when I was younger, I simply couldn’t go into a store that had an ultrasonic alarm – it was like a tiny drill burrowing into my skull. (No, I couldn’t hear dog whistles.)

So I certainly heard SOUND differently than most people. From that I also gather that there are differences in the way that people experience colour.

6

I think until we figure how those Vulcans perform that mind meld, the question is unanswerable, but I don’t think that we should not try to see how close we can come to an answer. I think there is some evidence that color(or colour) perception is not subjective. If you mix yellow and blue pigments you will perceive green. This makes sense because green is between yellow and blue in the spectrum. But if you mix blue and red it looks like purple, but yellow is halfway between blue and red in the spectrum. Yet everybody (with normal color vision) percieves the mixture the same as pure purple and no one sees yellow. This (to me at least) shows that there is something objective here.

7

It sounds like theres two related problems that Dave is asking about. The easy one is color perception. We all have pretty much the same receptors in our eyes, and the same neural pathways which allow us to sense color. Sure, we’re all slightly different, but we’re similar enough that the CIE (Commission International de l’Eclairage, the international organization for colorimetry) was able to define an idealized “standard observer”, which approximated to a good degree how we respond to color. There were some flaws with the experiment, like a small sample size, but the results have been used by colorimeters for years now.

Check out the Color Physics FAQ for more info.

The tricky problem (and one which I don’t know much about) is color labeling. Given a color, which we percieve the same way, what name do we give it. I think that there is a lot more discrepency here than in perception. For example, when looking at cyan on a computer screen, I’d call it bluish, but a friend of mine calls it greenish.

8

Names are always subjective, and never succeed in being anything but convenient symbols for us to use in communication. Cyan is just a name. You and your friend calling it different things really says nothing about differences in perception unless your friend was colorblind and described it as a shade of gray.

9

The answer is no, although I can’t cite a reference right off, this was discussed in Scientific American some years ago.

As I recall the discussion,

The three major colors are the responses of three different chemicals. In some people the green pigment is a different chemical, with a slightly different response curve. In itself, this is not unusual, as most colored chemicals in the body come in different variations. Some “blue-eyed” people have different pigments than others, not just a mixture of pigments like hazel.

There was more, but I’ve forgotten it.

10

I’m not sure if anyone brought up this thought: Have any PET scans been done comparing the reactions of people’s visual centers, as they’re presented with different colored cards?

Also, Timothy, your hearing high frequencies sounds a bit like autism (which can cause either a hypER or hyPO effect on one or more of peoples’ 5 senses. There is even a very rare form of autism called face-blindness, which is truly debilitating. I know about it from a guy who created a website after suffering this for more than 50 years.)

Some examples of people with auditory idiosyncracies: Temple Grandin, an autistic who wrote a book called Emergence, said that her father?? grandma?? couldn’t stand the sound of coal going down a coal chute. She herself couldn’t concentrate while on a payphone in a public place (due to auditory confusion). Also, another autistic, Georgie Stahli (of the Georgianna Found.) grew up tortured for years because of her extremely sensitive auditory nerves which strongly amplified the sound of water droplets dripping even very far away. She, and other autisitcs, were helped by a Swiss doctor specializing in auditory training, who desensitized her hearing by putting her in an enclosed booth with earphones & adjusting sounds that she’d hear. The procedure was temporarily painful, but effective.

Both a classmate & my mother couldn’t stand the sound of squeaking chalk. I’m not like that, but on the other hand, I’m able to hear when someone is coming up the walkway to our house, when my mother is not able to. Also, oerhaps because I genetically have dry ear wax (like Orientals) my ears do not pop at high altitudes, but rather they become more & more stuffed.

I’m also turned off by different types of smells (which don’t bother others). For example, smoke doesn’t bother me much, therefore others are able to detect that smell before me, since they’re bothered by it. On the other hand, alcohol bothers me, so I’m usually able to detect that smell before others do. And so on.

I wanted to add something about differences in visual perception. Besides color perception there is also peripheral perception. I once came across a website of an Oriental girl with very slitted eyes, who opted for surgery to make her eyes more rounded. She said the surgery made such a difference, because she was now capable of peripheral vision, thus viewing the world with clearer perception.

11

I was drawn to this thread because I am colorblind. This is a question that has vexed me forever, but not in the same way as the OP.

Using the firetruck example, a friend and I look at the same red firetruck. Knowing I’m colorblind, and being a bit of a wiseguy, the friend asks “What color is the firetruck.” Of course, I answer “Red.” This always gets the same response: “I know it’s red, but what color does it LOOK like?” I answer: “It LOOKS red.”

It seems that people expect me to say something like “It looks blue, but since I know it’s a firetruck, I’ll say red.” The fact is, even to a colorblind person, a red firetruck looks red. The color doesn’t look like something else. It’s red.

The problem for a colorblind person is in separating the colors. That’s why those famous “spot tests” work. A colorblind person separates and combines colors differently than other people. Different numbers jump out of those tests. This can be useful, however. I have heard of the military using colorblind people to look for camouflaged enemy positions. The colors combine differently and some colorblind people can find artificial camouflage better than other people can.

A colorblind person learns to compensate, however, the colors don’t usually look like some other color. I just can’t always tell you the name of the color. My four-year-old son is amazed by this. He doesn’t understand why his dadddy doesn’t know his colors yet!