From: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/

I know I disagree with people about colour perception

Quote:


No one could see the color blue until modern times (BI)

Paulo Philippidis / flickr

This isn�t another story about that dress, or at least, not really.

It�s about the way that humans see the world, and how until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a color, we may not even notice that it�s there.

Until relatively recently in human history, �blue� didn�t exist, not in the way we think of it.

As the delightful Radiolab episode �Colors� describes, ancient languages didn�t have a word for blue � not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there�s evidence that they may not have seen it at all.
How we realized blue was missing

In the Odyssey, Homer famously describes the �wine-dark sea.� But why �wine-dark� and not deep blue or green?

In 1858, a scholar named William Gladstone, who later became the Prime Minister of Great Britain, noticed that this wasn�t the only strange color description. Though the poet spends page after page describing the intricate details of clothing, armor, weaponry, facial features, animals, and more, his references to color are strange. Iron and sheep are violet, honey is green.

So Gladstone decided to count the color references in the book. And while black is mentioned almost 200 times and white around 100, other colors are rare. Red is mentioned fewer than 15 times, and yellow and green fewer than 10. Gladstone started looking at other ancient Greek texts, and noticed the same thing � there was never anything described as �blue.� The word didn�t even exist.

It seemed the Greeks lived in murky and muddy world, devoid of color, mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow.

Gladstone thought this was perhaps something unique to the Greeks, but a philologist named Lazarus Geiger followed up on his work and noticed this was true across cultures.

He studied Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Of Hindu Vedic hymns, he wrote: �These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn�s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again� but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs� and that is that the sky is blue.�

There was no blue, not in the way that we know the color � it wasn�t distinguished from green or darker shades.

Geiger looked to see when �blue� started to appear in languages and found an odd pattern all over the world.

Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a color to come into existence � in every language studied around the world � was red, the color of blood and wine.

After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colors to appear in every language is blue.

The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians � and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.

If you think about it, blue doesn�t appear much in nature � there are almost no blue animals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flowers are mostly human creations. There is, of course, the sky, but is that really blue? As we�ve seen from Geiger�s work, even scriptures that contemplate the heavens continuously still don�t necessarily see it as �blue.�

Russell Mondy/FlickrIs the sky really blue? What does that mean?

In fact, one researcher that Radiolab spoke with � Guy Deutscher, author of �Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,� tried a casual experiment with that. In theory, one of children�s first questions is �why is the sky blue?� So he raised his daughter while being careful to never describe the color of the sky to her, and then one day asked her what color she saw when she looked up.

Alma, Deutscher�s daughter, had no idea. The sky was colorless. Eventually, she decided it was white, and later on, eventually blue. But it wasn�t the first thing she saw or gravitated towards, though it is where she settled in the end.
So before we had a word for it, did people not naturally see blue?

This part gets a little complicated, because we don�t exactly what was going through Homer�s brain when he described the wine-dark sea and the violet sheep � but we do know that ancient Greeks and others in the ancient world had the same biology and therefore, same capability to see color that we do.

But do you really see something if you don�t have a word for it?

A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, who speak a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green.

Vidipedia/Himba color experimentNamibian tribe member participates in a research project.

When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they couldn�t pick out which one was different from the others � or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.

But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English.

When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Can you?

Vidipedia/Himba Colour ExperimentWhich square is the outlier?

For most of us, that�s harder.

This was the unique square:

Vidipedia/Himba Colour Experiment

Davidoff says that without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it�s much harder for us to notice what�s unique about it � even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way.

So before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they didn�t know they were seeing it.

If you see something yet can�t see it, does it exist? Did colors come into existence over time? Not technically, but our ability to notice them may have�

For more fascinating information about colors, including information on how some �super-seeing� women may see colors in the sky that most of us have never dreamed of, check out the full Radiolab episode.

Unquote.

RedToo.

Thanks for that! I really enjoyed the bit about the Himba colour experiments. It really brings home to what extent something which appears to be an objective fact can be related to subjective ability to discriminate.

The objective fact is that the colors are not identical. It may not be that there isn't a difference in one case and there is in another but rather that we are just trained (by habit if nothing else) to disregard some differences as irrelevant and pay attention to others.

I know to this day my wife and I (and now my daughters as well) always debate when something is red or orange. While certain things like blood or carrots are obvious, artificial things like a crayon or a shirt or a piece of paper that sit between the two on the spectrum depending on how much yellow is in it will be debated.



The Jedi Master

What's surprising to me is that an "obvious" disctinction (as between the blue and green) is not at all evident to the Hambi and vice versa with respect to the different shades of green that the Hambi can see and which are quite indistinguishable to me.

The colours are objectively distinct (being a specific wavelength) and our eyes (rods and cones) are the same (presumably my rods and cones are reacting in distinct ways when looking at each square, same as the Hambi) but the scope of "wetware" (mis-)interpretation surprises and delights me

Something to consider is that all they had in the past were vegetable dyes to make certain colors, and blue or green are more difficult colors to get from that without newer industrial processes. You would tend to see more earthy browns and reds to color your world with.

Going back really far in the past, before flowering plants and modern grasses, the Earth would have looked different in color, much more bland.

And we all know that women are better than men at discerning different colors.

To be fair, you have to factor in the fact that no grown ass man will call something "carmine" during idle observation

Well that's certainly true, as Wittgenstein said, the limit of your language is the limit of your world.

So a culture that doesn't have a word for camel probably doesn't have much of a concept or idea of it, whereas cultures that have a dozen words for camel probably indicates a number of things about that culture.

The effect will be amplified in cultures that are remote, for example Inuit populations living on arctic ice. Imagine living in some regions of the world where the hardest substance you might know is bone- not stone or wood. Your concept of hardness and your language to describe hardness will probably indicate that.

Funny about the Egyptians, as blue comes into play very early on in Jewish history. They were masters of making blue dye from snails and other animals (as well as from plants) for the tzitzit that was to hang from the corners of their clothes.

Sort of like how glass is vaguely referenced as to its beginnings, but it was really the Jews that embraced and mastered it. Glass is impermiable, and therefore "clean" in all regards. One has to have two cutting boards in the kitchen, but only one set of glassware is ever required.

Yup. I believe the city of Tyros (modern day Lebanon) on the eastern Mediterranean coast was famous in the ancient world for its snail dye production.

Never take your wife or the Himba tribe to a paint store, is what this taught me...

Common wisdom says that we have three different retina cells for color perception - red, yellow, and blue. There is however a minority of people - I seem to remember a figure of .4% of the population, although it may actually be 4% - who have a fourth type of retina cell for a different type of yellow. It's a harmless, recessive mutation (both parents must have it to pass it on to their children), and because it's rare most of the affected people don't realize that they "have it". Usually it's discarded as "other people have no sense of color" as in "how can you possibly mix this sweater with that jacket!?"

So it indeed is a derivative case of "blind people arguing about colors". For THEM the difference is there and quite real, for others it is not. Hilarity ensues.


A similar but unrelated phenomenon is synaesthesia where seeing colors would also trigger neurons that are responsible for taste, smell, or touch. People with that disposition can actually associate certain tastes and colors to numbers which might help to explain why there are sometimes mathematical geniuses - some of them may simply perceive the world of numbers as being much richer than it is to most who simply recognize numbers as nothing but abstract concepts.

My father is color blind. As in red-green color blind. This has led to various amounts of hilarity, from using a "seeing eye Private" in Vietnam when he defused IED's (how disconcerting it must have been for the poor guy) to my mother's form of payback for being a sh*t.

It wasn't uncommon for him to show up at the Rod and Gun club wearing orange pants and a pink shirt after he had gone off on a three day weekend by himself.

I don't believe the guy doing the research with the Himba.
It is one thing to not have words to distinguish between
colours, it is a completely different thing to be unable to
distinguish similar from different whether you have words
or not.

Now, to understand where I going with this, you have to
know how colour perception works. We have three different
colour receptor chemicals, which respond to different
frequencies. But it isn't a simple on/off. Each receptor
has a response curve. Here are the curves for normal
colour vision:


Now, if one these curves is in a non-standard position, due
to a slight difference in the structure of the protein,
caused by a difference in the protein specifying gene, the
person will have a different colour perception than normal.
Note how two of the receptors have largely overlapping curves.
A slight increase in that overlap results in a common type
of colour blindness. But there are many different types of
possible non-standard curve. If the curves are distributed
the right way, a person could have extremely sensitive
discernment in the greens, but lose distinction in the blues.
I suspect this is what is going on with the Himba. There is
no way that one with standard colour response, even without
words for the colours, could not see a blue square standing
out among green ones.

It is possible the Himba have an as yet unclassified colour
response mutation, but I rather suspect they might simply have
the form of colour blindness shown on this site
http://www.color-blindness.com/2010/03/09/types-of-color-blindness/
in the image at the bottom of the page if one clicks on the
button "Tritan lines". The blue lines shown on the image
group ranges of colour which all look the same for that condition.
You will note that almost all the colour sensitivity is arrayed
across the green, while green and blue are not distinguished.

Unfortunately, because this form of colour deficiency -
tritanomaly - is very rare, I can't find a thorough discussion
with lots of nice response curves for the anomalous receptor,
as there are all over the net for red-green blindness.

I have to conclude that unless a proper medical test for this
condition were conducted and found them to be free of it, this
is by far the most likely explanation, and the "researchers" would
be grievously sloppy. On the other hand, I still find it
profoundly unlikely that the Himba would be found to have a
normal physiological colour response.

Quoting my post in the dress-thread, linking to a BBC documentary which also happens to have the subject of colour perception and also shows the Himbas doing the experiments as well:


Unfortunately I didn't find a link to the actual documentary yet...

Tekhelet is a color of blue mentioned in the Hebrew tongue, it was a color used for the drapes in Solomon's temple and worn by the high priests. A 2000 year old piece of fabric confirms it as blue:

http://www.diggingwithdarren.com/blog/2011/03/02/murex-trunculus-confirmed-as-biblical-tekhelet/

So know we know, Tekhelet was blue.