Having Color Described to You

[Monke Jimmy]

I'm not sure how many blind/colorblind people use this site, but as a red-green color deficient guy I had a thought. 

I usually tell people that I just have trouble distinguishing colors, and that I can still see all of them, which is oversimplified, but true. I also tell people that I put less significance on color, because I can rely on it a lot less than other visual cues. The other day I was listening to my friend describe "fuchsia," and I thought to myself, "does this really actually matter to me?"

In my cognitive psychology class, I've learned that color is a psychological and a cultural construct. Our brains group together certain frequencies or combinations of frequencies as color, based on how much three types of cones are activated, etc. The way we describe the colors we see is very heavily culturally based. The only scientifically measurable part about it is the frequency and amplitude, like any other electromagnetic wave. 

 

So, for those who can't see color as well or at all, here is my question: do you actually care at all about descriptions of color? Does it have any meaning to you, or is it just a bunch of useless information to you?

[OggleSand]

I'm colour blind too, it sounds like in a similar way. I put much less emphasis on colour than most people I know. What colour are her eyes? I don't know, I don't really pay attention to that. But, colour descriptions are not useless information. A description of colour usually helps with bringing out the feeling. If I'm reading I appreciate colour descriptions and I like to have them included. I like to hear how green the grass is or how deep blue the sky or the water is. But it's further down on the list about what is important to describe any given setting.

 

A big YES to the cultural part of colours and words we have to describe them. Orange is this narrow colour band between red and yellow, but green goes from aqua to forest green to mint green to lime computer #00FF00 green. WTF. I'm still not 100% convinced purple exists at all.

[daveb]

I apparently do have some issues with color vision (established with various color vision tests and some incidents in my life). For the most part I don't think it affects me much though, except sometimes when trying to read things with colored text and/or colored backgrounds of certain ranges of color or color combinations. Or the time I thought I had chosen a nice light blue paint and painted a bedroom with it, only to have other people tell me it looked gray and glum.  

 

I'm not sure about color descriptions. I suppose it can be good in some cases, such as when reading (fact or fiction), or when someone is trying to tell me about something cool or exceptional or something. Or maybe to compare how they perceive a color vs how I perceive it.

 

There is certainly a cultural aspect to color and how it is perceived/conceived and processed in the brain and in language. I think it's pretty well established about how words for colors tend to develop in different languages in a certain order - for example, they might only have light/white and dark/black. If there is a third color it's usually a red. Next comes yellow or green. I don't think there is any known language that deviates to the extent that it only has purple and orange, or only has black and white and pink, for example. 

 

Another thing that can affect color perception is what other colors are around the color, as well as what kind of lighting we see them in. We don't always see colors in isolation. One thing I have noticed from time to time is everything will look to me like it has a strong pink or magenta cast to it. I suspect that's because my eyes/brain had gotten used to some other lighting and doing mental "white balancing", and then I go into a different environment with different lighting and my eyes/brain take a little while to readjust. I also know that someone who had been in that second environment didn't perceive things as being pinkish, because I got odd reactions when I mentioned it. And to me the effect was strong enough that I knew it wasn't the slight differences I might actually perceive in other circumstances.

[Monke Jimmy]

31 minutes ago, OggleSand said:

I'm still not 100% convinced purple exists at all.

Purple is a weird color. Technically it's a nonspectral color and doesn't exist on the color spectrum. It combines frequencies from the low and high ends simultaneously. Violet, on the other hand, is described as purple but is just on an extreme end of the spectrum, past blue. 

Also, there's this unfortunate spot right around where all of these aqua/turquoise colors are that people sometimes describe as green and sometimes as blue. I can see blue just fine, but that blue-green spot just has no color foe me. 

[Monke Jimmy]

5 minutes ago, daveb said:

I suspect that's because my eyes/brain had gotten used to some other lighting and doing mental "white balancing", and then I go into a different environment with different lighting and my eyes/brain take a little while to readjust.

This sounds like color adaptation/fatigue effects in the retina. This part isn't actually mental, but is about the photoreceptors in your cones. If you look at the opponent-process theory of color, though, you can find a different kind of fatigue that takes place through neural processing. Most psych students are shown the weird color U.S. flag, if you can find it. 

[Starry Sky]

I have no issues seeing color but have always found this topic so interesting. Accurately describing things involving senses is near, if not, impossible and requires previous experience to draw from descriptors. Interpretations of colors vary quite a lot too. Pink can be red to someone and blue can be green. I think brown is a neat one; it truly is just desaturated warm tones. 

Spoiler

 

If I recall correctly, there are even languages that lump it into red or at least put other colors together as the same thing despite distinct differences 

[Artemis42]

As someone who's fully blind but remembers colours from when I could see them as a kid, I like colour descriptions for a lot of things. Knowing the colours of my clothes is important, for example, and knowing what colour certain belongings are can be helpful if I need to describe them to someone. If I'm not told the colour of something, my brain will subconsciously choose a colour to imagine it being anyway. I’m generally less concerned about what people look like and can't visualize them very clearly anyway, but learning how the people in my life look can still be interesting, especially if I'm particularly attached to them. 

[verily-forsooth-egads]

It bothers me when people try to describe colors to the blind-from-birth as if they need to comprehend colors to comprehend anything, or like they're missing out on life's greatest joy. Yeah, colors are aesthetically nice, but music does all that and more.

 

It does seem a little sad to think you're seeing all the colors when you're not though. Purple is pretty.

[J. van Deijck]

My husband is colourblind. Not sure which kind of colourblindness, but he doesn't really distinguish green from purple (he thought for years that his favourite hoodie is green, while it's purple) and he sees red as kinda brownish. I'd like to use some advice if anyone has any, of how to use words to describe colours he sees "incorrectly".

[Monke Jimmy]

52 minutes ago, Baasje said:

My husband is colourblind. Not sure which kind of colourblindness, but he doesn't really distinguish green from purple (he thought for years that his favourite hoodie is green, while it's purple) and he sees red as kinda brownish. I'd like to use some advice if anyone has any, of how to use words to describe colours he sees "incorrectly".

That's an interesting problem, since purple and green theoretically have opposite RGB values. Maybe it's some kind of neutral point phenomenon, and he assumed the grayish was green? It's hard to figure it out sometimes in real life situations because you don't really need that much color knowledge to get around. 

As for how to describe those colors, maybe just familiarize yourself with a frequency spectrum or RGB values. People have three color receptors. Green stimulates the medium frequency one the most. Purple stimulates the other two, but not the medium frequency one. 

[Picklethewickle]

I'm not colourblind, but I've always been confused about the whole process of describing colours to people who can't see them. There is often an emotional or indirect quality to those descriptions that I don't understand. For example, red is said to be like anger, or like heat. Why? Blue is sad and cold. Why? Yellow is like the feel of sunlight. Why? Also, you basically feel sunlight as temperature, so why isn't the sun red if red is heat? 

 

To people who are colourblind, have you had colours described to you this way? Or is this just some foolishness that gets inflicted on people who aren't colourblind?

[daveb]

Colors based on heat vary depending on how hot the heat is and to some extent, possibly what elements are present. Stars are classified by color based on hotness - from red being the coolest to blue being the hottest. You can see the same effect in fires and such - white hot is actually much hotter than red hot.  

 

There are certainly emotions and other connotations assigned to various colors, too. Often those can be cultural. For example, black is associated with death and mourning in "western" societies, while white or red or purple or another color or set of colors is associated with death and the like in other cultures.

[Olallieberry]

I (not conventionally colorblind) have had a tetrachromat describe differences between colors which I perceive as identical.

 

I don't really see it as a superpower or anything.

[Alaska Native Manitou]

Describing colors through touch in the movie "Mask."

[Nick2]

Have any of you color blind people tried those glasses that let you see color?

[OggleSand]

3 hours ago, Nick2 said:

Have any of you color blind people tried those glasses that let you see color?

No (t yet). I took the online test a few years ago on the company's website and it said that it might cause some small changes for me in optimal well-lit conditions. Didn't seem to promise very much, so I haven't pursued it much. Those glasses work by filtering out "extra" light in the frequencies we see relatively well so that the muted barely-there colours are more relatively present - so it gets darker overall. You apparently need good daylight for it to work. Also, I'm scared that it will be really awesome and I won't want to ever take them off.

 

On 4/28/2023 at 10:45 AM, verily-forsooth-egads said:

Purple is pretty.

Once I've seen purple, how could I go back to my bleak purpleless existence?!

[OggleSand]

On 4/28/2023 at 1:03 AM, Monke Jimmy said:

that blue-green spot just has no color foe me.

me neither, might as well be grey. this idea really helped me to understand what is going on:

 

 

red = not much

teal = that zero gap between blue and green

purple = blue + red = blue + not much = blue

yellow = super color between green and red. yellow is the best

 

[daveb]

3 hours ago, Nick2 said:

Have any of you color blind people tried those glasses that let you see color?

I have not, but I'm not that motivated to seek them out. I suppose I would try them if I were ever in a position to give them a free trial with no effort on my part.  

[Monke Jimmy]

4 hours ago, Nick2 said:

Have any of you color blind people tried those glasses that let you see color?

I have. From what I could tell, they just shifted the light from green things, so you're like, "wait, that curtain is different. It must be green." It doesn't actually let you see those colors the way other people do. 

[Monke Jimmy]

1 hour ago, OggleSand said:

this idea really helped me to understand what is going on:

While I think this model is probably the case for a lot of people, I think it's misleading for most. I think most of the time an M/L cones response curve is just reduced or nonexistent. I've drawn this for people, but I just draw it as a much lower middle curve. With less input, the brain has a harder time comparing red/green (in opponent-process neurons) and that's why they're hard to distinguish. Having less information from middle frequencies means there's a gap between blue (S-cones) and yellow (M/L-cones). 

Basically that model ignores the opponent-process theory, which to be fair is hard to draw in a diagram, but in general yes, there is less information there. Also, there should be much more overlap. Tealish does still register as visible light. 

You could also think of it as, if you're missing one type of cone entirely, there's always going to be a point right in the middle where your two receptors fire at the same rate, which is the same effect you'd get if you were looking at white light. 

[Anomaly Q3Xr]

I struggle with colours, I have since childhood, but I very much don't think any sort of "description" would help, as I also cannot visualise things, so it just wouldn't really interest me if someone were trying to describe colour, it is just information that is not needed (for me) and would likely result in getting absolutely nowhere but wasted time.

[what the face]

“Color itself is a degree of Darkness”.   Goethe

 

check out this genius artist/writer and scientist’s published paper on color.

brilliant.   (pun intended)

[Monke Jimmy]

1 hour ago, what the face said:

“Color itself is a degree of Darkness”.   Goethe

 

check out this genius artist/writer and scientist’s published paper on color.

brilliant.   (pun intended)

Well, I think this is a good example of a cultural, almost spiritual dxplanation of color. It's also funny how you can see "yellow-red" still existed back then, before we had a word for orange. I always tell people that the color is named after the fruit lol.