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Color My World

After doing a bit on color earlier this week (see "Blue My Mind" ), I found this related 2022 article/interview from Knowable Magazine.

         Color is in the eye, and brain, of the beholder  
The way we see and describe hues varies widely for many reasons: from our individual eye structure, to how our brain processes images, to what language we speak, or even if we live near a body of water

Now, I don't have a whole lot to say about it; I consider this to be more of a follow-up. I didn't expect it to follow-up so soon, but such are the perils of random number generators.

Some people are color-blind. Others may have color superpowers.

The former seems to be linked to a Y chromosome; the latter, to an XX pair. Make of that what you will; I call it semirandom genetic variation. Like how the gene complex for calico cats is linked to the XX. For whatever it's worth, I seem to have perfectly standard color vision, but I have two friends, both male, both with Irish ancestry, who are colorblind to different degrees.

That's not science, by the way. That's an observation of a couple of data points.

To learn more about individual differences in color vision, Knowable Magazine spoke with visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten of the University of Sussex...

And the rest of the article is an edited transcript of that interview.

As I said, I don't have much to say, for once. So I'm not going to reproduce parts of the interview. I will note that they do make mention of The Dress, which I also covered in an entry fairly recently, but that was in the old blog.

There's also some reinforcement of what I said before: that the spectrum is, well, a spectrum, with way more than seven colors. Some say there are millions. I'm pretty sure the actual number is finite, at any rate. To reiterate, the "seven colors" thing can be traced back to Newton, who associated them with other mystical sevens like the Sun and Moon plus five visible planets.

And at the end (spoiler alert), it reiterates the philosophical question (I say philosophical, because we don't have a scientific means of testing this yet) that Kid Me posed: do I see the same colors that you do? I don't know. I also don't know that it matters except in terms of satisfying one's curiosity.

So, maybe tomorrow I'll have more to say. We'll see. And we'll see in different colors.