So is there a lot of confidence in the ‘green is the complementary color of red’ reason for why we see green instead of other colors in some cases?
No.
See elelle’s posts.
My money is on the formal study.
Surely there must be a comprehensive Naval study, though.
I did see elelle’s post. I guess I’m just not following why vasoconstriction = green color.
At a guess: vasoconstriction causes decreased blood flow but it doesn’t stop the nearby tissues from continuing to demand oxygen. As the blood slows down it is deprived more quickly than usual of its oxygen and rapidly takes on its deoxygenated blue-green color.
I, too have seen people be distinctly GREEN when severely motion sick. In my case, getting into a military plane that had just spent hours flying at 13,000 feet through thunderstorms.
It was one of the planes used decades before in the Berlin airlift, stoppered holes in the window in case the crew needed to put down suppressive fire when they landed. Unpressurized.
When I entered, the first guy closest to the door in the central rank of rear-facing seats was literally green. Face and to a lesser extent arms. (Short sleeved shirt). He was almost unconscious. I had asked of the passengers in general, “how was the flight?” before I saw him.
“Rough, vewy wough,” he answered.
I don’t believe the complementary color theories. He appeared to have a distinct greenish pigment. I myself, after surgery, have been white as a sheet, literally, from pain. My wife held a piece of paper up to me. Very similar. But I had no greenish color, only pure white (I was given an experimental anesthetic that did not work. I was fine once I was released and able to take Demerol.)
I think something is going on besides vasoconstriction. Maybe something only a few people do. Maybe ones with some sort of hepatic problem?
A seasick person turns green when they look at a non-seasick person and become green with envy.:rolleyes:
I saw a person turn green, literally green, at a party once a while back – about the time of the original post. It was a party at my house, and a guy who’d had a few beers and some weed, but didn’t seem to be visibly intoxicated, started to walk up some stairs and began to reel and stagger. We helped get him in the kitchen where we could check him out better, and everyone was flabbergasted that his face was literally green. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. I thought for sure he was going to hurl – if that had been my face I can assure you I’d be nauseous – but he said no, he was OK. Turns out he had Crohn’s disease, and this happened to him from time to time under the right conditions. It was certainly noteworthy. Everyone remembered it thereafter as the party where Doug turned green.
While I know know anything about the physiology here, as a general point, color is an entirely subjective phenomenon. There is no reason to have any confidence, at all, that a perceived greenish cast would still appear green when compared against, say, a neutral gray illuminated by direct sunlight.
Some examples:
https://www.illusionsindex.org/images/illusions/grey-strawberries/greystrawberriesmainimage.png
Do you see red strawberries here? There are no pixels where red is the dominant component; it is all shades of cyan and gray. The strawberries look red because your brain adjusts for the cyan cast.
Or this one:
Do you see shades of blue and green? Nevertheless, every pixel is a shade of red or gray.
Maybe faces do turn green; I really couldn’t say. You just can’t conclude that based on seeing a green face. There are too many subjective effects going on to be confident without better instrumentation.
(Of course, there’s a philosophical point here. If color is subjective, then maybe we should say that if something looks green, then it is green, by definition. But that makes comparisons hard. I would claim that we should at least first normalize to standard lighting and reduce scene effects.)
The lil’wrekker turns green whenever she nauseous about anything. It is a shocking green color. Even a nurse at her doctors office couldn’t believe how green she was. I ask the Doc about it. He shrugged and said “dunno”. Really instilled confidence.
His parents bought him books and sent him to school and the best he can come up with is “dunno”? Did you check his medical license? :dubious: