col•or "ke-ler\ noun often attrib [ME colour, fr. OF, fr. L color; akin to L celare to conceal — more at hell] (13c)
1 a : a phenomenon of light (as red, brown, pink, or gray) or visual perception that enables one to differentiate otherwise identical objects
b : the aspect of objects and light sources that may be described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation for objects and hue, brightness, and saturation for light sources
Since when? I’m looking at black hair right now (on my arm).
I disagree. The retina and the brain are simply instruments. It seems unnecessary, and therefore anti-Ockham, to postulate that different human brains routinely work differently. Naturally, there are anomolous brains, like psychotic ones, for instance, but these are simply analogous to broken or dysfunctional instruments.
Red should look the same to everyone who is not color blind.
I’ve gotta agree with the whole each eye sees differently thing. One of my eyes has a more yellow tinge, the other a more blue tinge.
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
Spoke,
I also have an eye to eye color perception difference. The right eye perceives the world with a slight bluish cast while the left sees a more brownist cast that I think of as more normal - whatever that is. My ophthalmologist has had other patients with the same issue but has no explanation.
I did have a MRI to rule out a brain tumor. I believe that was the obligatory “cover your ass MRI” more than anything else.
So there Nickz!!
i have a weird eye thing happening,
i have 20/25 vision in my right eye and 20/110 in my left.
i am legally blind in my left eye because my vision cannot be corrected with lenses.
i can, however, see colors and motion.
my brain naturally shuts off any information it receives from my left eye if my right eye is open
but, i also notice a slight difference in shade between my left eye and my right eye. i just always attributed it to my funky vision.
to respond to nickrz, i think some color perception might be effected by the shape of the cornea. not just the brain. this is just a guess, i just made it up now, and i have no scientific evidence to back up that statement. it just seems to make sense
For each wavelength of visible light (approximately 350nm to 750nm if I remember the scale correctly) there is a corresponding color. That’s just a physical fact. Pertaining to the perception of color, I think it would be possible to view colors differently from each eyes due to differing configurations and quatities of rods and cones. I’m not a physiologist and have only had some introductory exposure to neurophysiology, so, if there’s someone out there to shed some light on this conjecture, please do so.
Awright! Weird different-shade-in-each-eye people unite!
melanietarrant–
Like you, I am significantly more nearsighted in one eye than in the other. Maybe there is some relationship between the two phenomena. Any of you other two-shade people have a difference in nearsightedness as well?
btw: that’s quantities, not quatities. oops.
spoke said:
I read somehwhere that each person’s individual eyes see slightly different colors; f’rinstance, the left eye sees “cool” colors and the right eye “warm”… but I can’t back it up right now. BTW, I have noticed it myself too, especially on very bright days.
Sucks to your assmar.
I’ve also often pondered whether other people see the same colors, and whether they would be completely imcomprehensible to me. Then I thought, “Who cares?” As long as you know what colors are what, and they apparently match up with everyone elses, then everything’s peachy! And besides, that question is the first step to existentialism, “Do I exist?” “Do others exist?” “How do I know others aren’t just imagined?” etc. And besides, colors obviously aren’t the same to everyone, otherwise no one would be color-blind. Right?
That doesn’t apply to me. I’m not near-sighted at all, but I have noticed the different shades in each eye as well. I find it interesting that we all seem to have different colors involved (blue and yellow for one person, blue & brown for another).
For me, the colors are tinged with red when I look at something with my left eye, and tinged with blue when I look with my right eye. I first noticed this when I was just a kid and the difference seems to be most pronounced when I look at brown things.
Cool! Blue in one eye and red in the other? Do you not have to wear the red and blue 3-D glasses when viewing appropriate pictures/movies? 
When I was in art school I had a professor speak of this very subject. Everyone sees hues differently withtheir right and left eyes, one cooler and the other warmer. I never found this very practical art-wise, but interesting none the less. Try it yourself, look at a simple color in good light and pass your hand over each eye, back and forth while concentrating on the color. If you pay close attention to the subtlties of color you should notice a slight shift in the color “warmth”, ie a greener (cooler) yellow vs a more orange (warmer) yellow.
spoke-:
Well, this issue of different colors for different folks is philosophical enough, but now you ask me to accept that it should be obvious to me that you have but one brain. Hmm. Am I, out here in cyberspace, supposed to believe that if you had two brains you would write like this siht ekil etirw? Or would your writing be vertically reflected? Since I never ran into anyone before whose name ended in a hyphen, I’m left suspecting that you did have a second brain once, hence the hyphen, but mislaid it somewhere. Not all brains keep track similarly, as to where each other one is. . ., obviously.
Ah, but, back to the OP, the question is a worn-out old philosophical one that has no real meaning but wastes a lot of philosophers’ time. . .if that’s possible. First, note, what Nen says:
No! That’s a **psycho[b/]physical tenet. Colors are not in the physical domain / from the physical aspect. Only psychophysics attempts to quasi-scientifically relate colors to different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, or mixtures thereof, by comparing JNDs in their perception over a population of “normal” humans. You certainly know that you can’t tell the difference in the “color” of an emission of light at a pure frequency that you would perceive as “yellow” from some combination of two light frequencies individually perceived by you as red and green, which I could exhibit to you in some certain proportion that you would also call the identical hue, saturation and brightness of “yellow”.
Within the “normal” color-sighted population, there is significant agreement on using some common label, particularly on the primary additive and subtractive “colors”, because these produce responses peaking at the resonant or anti-resonant frequencies of the standard chemical pigments in the “normal” human eyes’ cones, and the “normal” tissues in front of these cones don’t appreciably differently distort these spectral points. However nerves in the different brains hook up from these photoreceptors, if the brains communicate to any extent, they will choose common “color” terms or translatable ones. The issue of correspondence of color qualia in different minds/brains is only an aberration assignable to the mind/brain (subjective/objective) enigma. You may, in a time not too far away be able to get wide-band parallel electronic interfaces going between brains, and think you’ll answer this philosophical question, but you won’t, because it’s a nonentity / aspect-mismatched apposition. (BTW, tonight’s SF Channel 4 TV presented news of UCB’s mixing silicon electronics and human cells on the same chip: RealVideo or QuickTime .) (If that last URL fails in its UBB code and widens this thread, speak to the HTML-killers at SDMB. Preferably use the first URL if you have the right client, because the other one takes too long to download.)
The issue of one eye’s seeing a slightly different color than the other is a very different question. Consider two normal eyes in the same person. Then let a fair amount of blood escape into the cornea in front of only one of them. That eye will certainly temporarily see a more reddish or brownish shift of colors away from what the other eye sees, as would only the one eye which had an inanimate translucent colored filter placed in front of it. Other physiological eye problems can shift colors otherwise. Permanence of such filtering may, however, result in one’s brain’s reevaluation of such deviances to proceed toward a minimum.
My left eyesight is nearly gone from glaucoma, remaining now only in a tiny field area peripheral to the physiological blind spot. There are very few cones out in that remaining area. I can’t see enough in that eye in order to compare relative color perception between my two eyes, but it appears that I perceive a blue field better in that region than a red, green or yellow field, so that a blue-green object at that point in the field of that eye would no doubt appear bluer with that eye than it would in a more central point of the other eye, where the differently pigmented cone receptors would be in the normal proportion for such area.
You can only compare the physical so far in. What you pull out from the subjective side, your mind, is not communal physical reality. Comparing such qualia associated with the other senses, between different persons, runs up against the same meaninglessness. Wage has it pegged pretty well.
Ray (Color me opaque.)
I’m jumping in hoping beyond hope to return this thread to its normal width --manhattan
[Note: This message has been edited by manhattan]
OK, you UBB-code purveyors, get your URL code fixed to take care of very long URLs! Or, at least, to reject them, maintaining the integrity of the thread’s text width.
Ray (did it again.)
The problem wasn’t that it was a long URL, it’s because you put a full stop (period, sorry) after the last bracket. There has to be a space for it to work properly.
Anyway, I think that, for what it’s worth, if you are able to measure someone’s colour blindness physically (and I don’t know if you can) by studying rods and cones and whatever in the physical eyeball itself, then colours must be perceived the same universally. If you can’t measure it physically, then there’s no way to tell what people are actually perceiving after all.
-PIGEONMAN-
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Shadow of the Pigeon -
Weirdo of the Night
Hah! I’m King of the UBB!
Thanks for identifying the problem, GuanoLad.
Change Your Password, Please and don’t use HTML, as it has been disabled
I’m glad I’m appreciated, Nanobyte. I was beginning to think no one at all read my posts. :o
I’ve thought a lot about that question also. I think everyone has. Another interesting question is: What if suddenly you saw another color, that was beyond what you can see now? Like, ultraviolet. How would you desccribe it to others? And how do you describe a color to someone who is colorblind?
Also, regarding the fact that eyes see different colors even on the same person - they do. But it is variable. If you wear 3D red/cyan glasses for long periouds of time (I’ve done this before.) when you take them off, the eye which the red lens was covering will see everything in a bluish tint, and the eye which the blue lens was covering will have a reddish tint, due to the fact that the color receptors are resting, and cyan is the opposite of red. Kind of the same principle of how you see splotches on your eyes after staring into a bright object, such as the sun.
It also happened to me after wearing orange ski goggles for a long time - after a while, my view stopped looking orange, and it sort of balanced out to gray. Then when I took the goggles off, everything looked bluish green. Your eyes can see in different shades for the same color, but I’m pretty sure which one appears brighter varies.