Friday, April 27, 2007

The eye: as percieved by the viewer

Although many people believe that everyone sees the same colors as they do, I recognize that this may not be the case at all. When you see green, for example, your eye sends the information about that color to your brain and your brain tells its consciousness that the color is, in fact, green. However, if you were a different person and you saw an entirely different color while you were looking at the same object, you would still see the object as green because you have learned throughout your life that the color you see now is green. There is no way to describe a color. The only way you can identify a color is by the name of the color or an object it is associated with. It may be hard to picture this happening, but as long as there is the same contrast between all the colors a person can see, whether they are seeing the same colors or not does not matter. It is quite possible that I am wrong, but this is my train of thought. After all, this is just a daily musing.

1 comment:

CNic said...

I think that you might be wrong on this point. Green light is part of the visible spectrum and has a set wavelength (555 nm) so there is an absolute green. While you may be right about colors being perceived differently, I see no reason that two unaltered brains would not see the exact same thing when looking at a color. Human eyes are not really that great at distinguishing between different colors anyway, so even small differences would be inconsequential.