January 22, 2015 • 37 mins
Up in the sky and down in the ocean, blue is the endcap of our visuall existence.One that may even influence us subconsciously. Find out why this color is the ultimate magician, appearing mostly as an illusion, in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to well your mind.
My name is Robert lamp and Um Julie Douglas. Julie,
we are podcasting on a very gray day. Fog has
not lifted for days, right that the sky is just
(00:24):
totally gray. My son keeps asking where sign where? Where
where do you go? And I have to begin to
explain rudimentary celestial mechanics to it, and the need to
test the same question again and then ask where where
is the blue sky? Well? And I think that is
the power of the blue sky in our lives, right,
(00:47):
It's depicted everywhere, It's we we were talking about this.
In children's books. You don't often see gray skies depicted.
You see blue skies. Will you do? In the Lorax,
which is my son's favorite book for seemingly forever, now,
very blue skies as well? Well? You have to because
of the small took skies of course, yes, Um, But
(01:08):
you know, I think blue is one of those really
important colors to us because on some physical level but
also subconscious level, it in end caps our visual field
that we think of when we think about our existence.
It's the color of the sky and the color of
the ocean. Um. And yet this is the thing about
blue is the ultimate magician, appearing mostly as an illusion,
(01:33):
which will discuss in a bit. Yeah, it's a it's
a powerful color. Uh. You know, we're gonna get into
some of the color theory in a bit that. Yeah.
I mean, it's the it's the color ultimately of the
of the sky and ocean. It's kind of the color
of emotion itself. I mean, people seeing the blues. Uh.
Picasso went through his blue period. Like I can't like
(01:56):
when I think of blue in terms of its just
emotional power, So I always end up picturing the uh
the picture of the Picasso did the old guitarist, you know,
where the very also kind of gray looking guitarist is
sending there his head bowed and looks old and tired
and sad, and he's just you know, caked in blue shades. Um.
I Also, I feel like with blue, I think back
(02:19):
a lot two times when I was a kid looking
up at like a really clear blue sky and there
being something comforting but also kind of oppressive about it,
you know. And uh, And I think about that a
lot too, especially if I'm if I'm far from home
and I look up and see that blue sky, there's
something there's something comforting and universal about it, but also
universal and in the same way that death is universal.
(02:42):
You know, it's that relentless blue and it's the relentless
light of the sun. Right, there's nothing to filter it.
I mean, is it any wonder that modern Mongolians still
pray to uh munk punk Kingary the eternal blue sky?
Is it any wonder? Ultraman Ultramarine is the pigment often
reserved to paint the mantle of a virgin Mary. By
(03:03):
the way, so she is typically seen with a very
blue color scheme. Indeed, so there are all sorts of associations.
For me, it's Miles Davis kind of blue, so in
that synesthesia sense. Okay, so you listen to Miles Davis
seeing the blues and you actually kind of well, he
has an album called kind of Blue and um, so
(03:27):
I always think of it's a sort of rainy night
music and it's a it's a very concentric patterned um
type of album, and that each song builds on this
familiar pattern, which kind of messes with it a bit.
But so for me, it's that that's space of jazz
and blues and melancholy. And again, I feel like I've
(03:48):
been talking about this a lot lately, the space the
absence um. But you know, again, the blue can be anything.
It can be that baby blue, um, it can be
Prussian blue, Turk boys blue, very hippyish to me, hey,
And indeed than you have that whole literally gray area
where blue touches gray and then you lose yourself and
(04:08):
like the German grays and German blues melding together bahlsi
and blues yah. On the color spectrum, it's wedged between
violet and green. It has a wavelength between four hundred
and fifty and four hundred nanometers, and blues with a
higher frequency and a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet,
(04:32):
while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength
gradually appear more green. Now pure blue that kind of
you said, have that sort of existential angst too. In
the middle has a wavelength of four hundred and seventy nanometers.
And we'll discuss this later, but this just happens to
be the range of um of color that we perceive
(04:54):
the most with the human eye. And of course I
should also mention that blue is my son's face, a
color which I find curious because we've my wife and
I have done no like coaxing along those lines, like
his his room is green, and we're not we're not
shoving a lot of like blue for boys, pink for
girls kind of thing down his throat. But he's he's
(05:15):
he's just, without question, latched onto blue is his favorite color.
And you ask him he likes blue. If he get
picks out his own shirt animal designs aside, he's going
to go for blue every time. Yeah, my daughter who's
six years old, also loves blue. I love blue. And
what this is pointing to is that there's sort of
a universal um gravitational force of blue over us. In
(05:37):
two thousand and eleven, Deluxe Paints conducted a survey involving
response from thirty different countries and found that across cultures,
blue was the preferred color among men and among women.
Now you're probably wondering, what else, what about the other
colors out there? The second favorite colors are red and green,
followed by orange, brown, brown, and purple. Brown is good.
(06:02):
Brown is an earth tone. My yoga man is brown,
so is poop all right, and then yellow is the
least favorite color, preferred only by five percent of people. Wow,
I'm so glad that yellow is half the color on
our our logo. But there, yeah, but we didn't choose that.
We just it's for you five percent out there. We're
(06:23):
looking after you. Another interesting finding is that both men
and women increasingly dislike orange as they age. Interesting. I've
heard before about orange being an unsettling color, like um,
if I remember correctly, the torture chamber in David Cronenberg's
video Drone is orange and color because they designed it
(06:45):
with some color theory in mind that said that orange
is a very unsettling color and is ideal if you
have an interrogation. I'm setting inmates right sometimes wear orange?
Or is that just? Is that just the show was
they would show up if they escape, because again, who
would wear orange? Who's gonna wear a full orange jumpsuit?
(07:06):
And unless they've escaped from prison? If I'm like orange
a lot, yeah, I mean I'm not opposed to it.
I did go to a university whose color was orange,
and that kind of turned me against it a little bit,
I guess, but you know, but by and large, I
don't have anything against orange. Alright, Okay, well let's think
about six hundred million years ago, when things were just
(07:31):
business as usual. The sun was shining in the Earth
was absorbing and reflecting that light, and uh, really, nobody
knew any better about what sort of colors were being
produced because there was no organism that could perceive that
light and color yet. Yeah. I mean, as far as
the organisms actual pigmentation goes, you could have bright red,
(07:52):
you could have a gray organism over here, sort of
translucent over here. But it doesn't really matter because what
limited kind of perception is going on is really just
more about light and dark. It's not it's about about it.
So the sun is up, the sun is down, the
moon is out. It's that kind of navigational, uh, sensory input.
But in terms of what color anything is, it does
(08:13):
not matter at all. Yeah. And now think about the
Earth and all of the vegetation and the creatures that
we're leaving living on it. Six hundred million years ago,
a lot of the colors and plants and animals um
came from and continued to come from, pigments, colored chemicals
that absorb certain wavelengths of light. And these pigments while
(08:35):
we think of them is more like ornamental today because um,
you know, we've largely hacked them that way our evolution
has um. They have been helpful in other ways. Granules
of melanin, for example, help keep bird feathers strong and
help protect human skin from the sun. And chlorophyll is
a chemical that helps plants trap light for photosynthesis. It
(08:55):
also makes them look green. Yeah, because we often we
like a colorful bird and we instantly think, oh, what's
colored this way for attention? It's all about a visual
presentation or it's about camouflage. But their actual structural properties
that are essential here, Yeah, and we tend to think
of them more as like color currency. Now again, peacock's
this this amazing display that is meant to attract a mate.
(09:21):
But those are things again that got hacked in evolution. Um,
it wasn't until a predator with eyesight showed up on
the scene that this became important. Color became important, and indeed,
according to the NPR story how Animals Hack the Rainbow
and got stumped on blue, this animal is probably like
a super fast shrimp creature. It's suddenly it has eyes,
(09:45):
it can see, it can pick up on colors. And
so if you happen to belong to a species of say,
bright red, little floaty, slimy invertebrate creatures up and all.
Now it hadn't mattered that you're bright red, but suddenly
here's this superpowered super predator shrimp and you're just sticking
out like a sore delicious thumb. Right. And as eyesight
(10:09):
evolves in creatures and as other creatures respond to it,
then you begin to see animals organism starting to actually
go after camouflage, go after other tactics that would help
them to survive with the colors that they have. Yeah,
I mean, and it's it really gets just increasingly complex.
Uh as as organisms evolved, so you end up with
(10:32):
just this this perplexing maze of interactions that we continue
to try and understand where you have bright colors on
one creature or saying stay away from me, and the
other hand is saying come closer, have a taste, and
then other times they're saying, please confuse me with the
other creature that this color just like me that happens
to be poisonous. It gets very complicated, very Yeah, you
have the whole pantone spectrum in there, and a bunch
(10:55):
of reasons for them. As you have just pointed out
a few Now, the majority of color earths are produced
by pigments, now particles of the color chemicals that we
talked about, and these are found within specialized cells. And
these include melanins, which are found in nearly all organisms
and produce more of the earth tones that you see
that that are pretty common even to us, right as humans.
(11:17):
And then you have carotenoids, which or carotenoids which produce
colors primarily in the red to yellow end of the spectrum.
So think about say, flamingos, they're pink because they're eating
carotenoid rich shrimp. Yeah, you look at like a baby flamingo.
They're not pink. They're not born pink, they're born kind
(11:39):
of gray. It's only through that diet that they end
up uh stealing the pigments and incorporating them into their diet, right,
And it's a really easy way to eat pink b pink. Right.
Then you would think the same thing would apply to
colors like blue and green, but it would be wrong
because it's really hard to replicate these colors into the
(12:01):
skin or feathers through diet. By the way, if if
humans eat enough carotenoids, generally through carrots, you can actually
adjust the color in your eyes just a little bit,
but nothing on the scale of changing your actual skin color. Um.
Of course, if you eat beats, which also have carotenoids,
you will see other color alternations take place. We talked
(12:24):
about this in the Biospheriens, Right, they had a diet
of sweet potatoes so much so that their skins, right,
they actually eat enough sweet potatoes to change their skin color. Yeah,
if your diet is extreme, Um, you can actually get
in on the flamingo ritual here if you want to
do that, a diet a sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes only. Now,
(12:46):
even I were talking about how the fact that green
isn't created in skinner feathers easily seems counterintuitive because you
look around and you look at the earth and it's
just full of green vegetation, right, Yeah, I mean, it's
one thing to think about blue as being this sort
of difficult to obtain pigment because you know, mine instantly
(13:10):
turns back to say the Radio Lab episode where they
talked about the possibility that the sky isn't really blue,
that it's all just about us being told that it's blue.
And I think about Oliver Sacks and as the book Hallucinations,
you know, seeking after indigo and uh and and taking
hallucinogens in order to to perceive like pure inhuman indigo.
(13:30):
And then you you've taken all that information, you can say,
all right, I can see where blue would not really
be a thing per se in in in the course
of evolution. But green, yeah, green is everywhere. Green would
it would be vital to your ability to camouflage yourself.
And in fact, we see so many different green creatures,
but when you get right down to it, we don't
(13:51):
really have that much green, uh in the natural world. No.
And in fact, there's a bit of color mixing for
some animals. So if you see a green frog out
in nature, it's not necessarily that they're eating a bunch
of chlorophyll and they're they're turning green. It's that they're
actually color mixing within the skin and using those pigments
pigments to produce that that green coloration. Yeah, it's a
(14:13):
yellow pigment and a blue structural color and the two
end up combining into this green effect. Yeah. Now, um,
so far in terms of blue, only two vertebrates have
been found that have blue coloring as a result of
cellular pigment called cyanaphores, and both the mantarin fish and
the closely related psychedelic mandarin called the picturesque dragonette, are
(14:37):
vividly colored fish native to coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean. Indeed,
but then it turns out that some of the sort
of more iconic blue creatures are are not really blue
at all. For instance, the blue morphoe butterfly, which is
beautiful creature, very picturesque example of blue. This is the one,
(14:59):
for instance, you've find it in Costa Rica, places like that,
and uh, and there was the famous situation where someone
forget which publication cinephotographer down to get a picture of one,
and they're actually very difficult to picture, to photograph their
wings open while they're they're they've landed, and so the
photographer just got a dead one and pinned it up
and then took the picture and it was there's like
(15:21):
a mild controversy over it, but it's a it's a
very blue looking wing surface. But it turns out that
you have tiny transparent structures on the surface of their
wings that bounce light in just the right way to
give them the appearance of this vibrant, rich blue. It's
really brilliant because on one side they're brown, and the
(15:43):
effact that's what you end up getting when you try
to photograph them. Most of the time, you just set
these brown wings and the effect of it being brown
on that side is to absorb all the other color
from the other wavelengths, so orange and yellow. And in
the meantime, on the other side, as you say, it's
got there was any transparent structures, and that is what
bounces the light. And of course, as we sort of
(16:05):
alluded to at the beginning of this, blue is the
wavelength that comes through the best, and so that's what's
bounced off the most through the atmosphere and off of
their wings, or at least one side. Now, if you
doubt this as an optical illusion, as the ultimate optical illusion,
you could grind up their wings and you would see
(16:27):
that there was not a speck of blue pigment in them,
only brown. If you wanted to grind up that seems terrible,
but yeah, well, ground up butterfly wings. Imagine that's an
ingredient and in some sort of which is brew I
mean sure, sure, yeah, but yeah, the crazy thing about
this is it all comes around essentially to meta materials.
You know, we're constantly running across new new studies have
(16:49):
been published new findings where they have some sort of
crazy new meta material where we're manipulating uh, surface structures
at a at a very minute level, and in doing so,
we're changing the ability of the substance to you know,
absorb or to shed a substance you know, shed water,
absorb water, or in the way that admit it manipulates light.
I instantly think back to the Tavanta black that we discussed.
(17:11):
You know, we have this menty materials that make this
this uh, this substance appear the surface appear blacker than
any natural black in our world. And essentially you have
you know, nature has been doing this since time out
of mind. It's been been working at that that minute
scale to manipulate the way the way that we perceive color. Yeah.
(17:34):
You and I were talking about solar sales earlier, and
we were saying, we're like, we're so proud of ourselves
as humans for creating this this material that can reflect
light and can do a bunch of things in the meantime,
you have these butterfly wings that are doing the same
sort of things on this smaller scale, albeit uh for
(17:54):
different reasons. Now, there's a two thousand and twelve study
that found that some birds use bubble laced keratin. This
is the same sort of stuff that you find in
human fingernails in the barbs of their feathers, and it
scatters the light from the feather in a way that
happens to look blue to humans. And Northern Woodlands Magazine
said a simple way to test this out is to
(18:17):
take a blue feather, hold it up to the sky
so that's back lit, and with the sunlight streaming through
the feather rather than bouncing off its surface, the blue
color vanishes and you just get this sort of drab
grayish brown. But if you bring the feather down so
that the light bounces off of it and scatters the
blue wavelengths of light, the feather then appears blue once again,
(18:37):
and this is called structural coloration. You know, then the
more we study this, the more it seems clear that,
you know, we have this this naive version of reality
in which they're just these pure colors, sort of Crayola
understanding of the world. You have all these pure colors
floating around, and some pages are are our color with
(18:59):
certains and others with other crayons. But it's really it's
almost like there are no real colors at all. When
you start breaking it down, it just gets it gets,
this gets so murky. Well, so when you consider other
organisms out there, like bees there they are perceiving ultra
violet lights that that we don't um. But yeah, I agree,
(19:19):
it's kind of funny to think of all the things
that are going on that we do not perceive. Because
I was thinking about again that feather, because you've got
that keratin structure, and there's a layer of melanin and
that is also working with the So the caratin is
bouncing off stuff and the melanin is absorbing red and
yellow wavelengths. So all that is going on, but we
(19:41):
don't see it. Now, if you want to talk about
a really fantastic blue that occurs in nature, or again
appears to occur in nature, uh, and we're talking like
supernormal stimuli level of blue, then you have the berry
of the Polia condensed sata plant, which has an exceedingly blue,
(20:04):
like reflectively intense blue that is just more potent than
any other living creatures. Blue. Yeah, yeah, that's that's what
uh old Rick Steiner, a physicist says about it. It It
says that it's reflectivity is really more intense than any
living thing. And he said most services reflect just a
small percentage of the light that hits them. However, this
(20:26):
berry reflects thirty of the light. The berry skin itself
has no pigment, no colored cells, or I should astric
that um. But all the cells are coiled in the
sort of twist, and the cells form sheets just like
the skin of an onion, and that allows light to
filter down through the layers in a way that creates
(20:47):
again that structural coloration that I was talking about with
the feather. And there's just a few cells in the
berry skin that do reflect other colors, and that is
what gives the fruit what Center calls a pick selated glow. Wow,
so you have you have a few pigments in there,
but then most of it is just completely structural color.
You look at this thing again, you think of it
(21:08):
in Crayola terms, and you think, wow, that that berry
is really painted with a nice blue. But there's there's
it's it's mostly just a matter of structurally altering the
way that the lights playing with it. Yeah, and there's
a good reason for this too. I mean, this is
a very tiny berry, so in a sense, it needs
(21:28):
to do this. It needs to be able to reflect
more white so that it can have the sort of
brilliant blue that as a beacon two birds to come
and eat it and spread it, spread the seeds. It's
it's basically like the it's the smaller business that has
blown its entire advertising budget on a really catchy Super
Bowl at Yeah, I was gonna say it's a snapple
(21:50):
of sodas. Maybe I'm not sure if that fits. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will discuss more about the color blue, uh, particularly
how plays into your eyes. All right, we're back, And
(22:11):
before we talk about the color blue of eyes and
and whether it actually even exists, we should talk about
the blue sky and whether it actually exists. Right, Yeah,
you get into this discussion. He's the sky actually really blue?
And where do we even get that idea? Is it
just something that we we hear about. We hear people
(22:31):
talk about the blue sky, Like didn't I don't remember
telling my son that the guy is blue. Did he
indeed just pick that up from a book where he
sees a more vivid depiction of blue and it looks
like his shirt that he's told as blue. Did somebody
at school say, hey, this guy is blue? Or is
there an innate blueness to the sky? Well, you've probably
heard the explanation before that, because the earth is covered,
(22:52):
you know, with water, that it's the This sky is
just reflecting that back. But that's not actually what's happening.
Think about the absence of light actually, and think about
what happens when we don't have light up in the
sky when it's dark. You know, you get the stars
coming out, and the sky appears to be a black
velvet color because of course we don't have any light
(23:13):
from the sun. But once the sun is up and
the rays of light play with particles in the air,
right that the gas molecules, then you have this interaction
of light and particles, and it looks kind of split
that white light. For a second, let's put it through
a prism. If we do that, we know we get
(23:33):
Roy G. BIV. And we know that each of those
color components of this rainbow of colors has different wavelengths,
And it turns out that the shorter the wavelength, the
more these colors will scatter in the atmosphere when the
sun is up, you know, during the day, and the
more our eyes will perceive them. I mean, that's sort
(23:57):
of the short and dirty answer here. Yeah, So essentially
about the scattering of that blue light, and that's why
we perceive this guy is blue. Yeah, because think about
You've got oxygen and nitrogen molecules dominating the atmosphere and
they're relatively small, and so these are interacting really well
with the wavelengths of indigo. Yes, and you're probably thinking
(24:21):
right now, indigo. Well, then why why doesn't this guy
appear much darker like indigo to us? Well, the second
part of the answer to why this guy is blue
is that the mechanics of our eyes are pretty flawed.
We can't actually perceive that color as it is, and
so are I. Our machinery does a little bit of
(24:43):
pigmentation itself. It takes some of that white light, mixes
it with indigo, and you get more of a blue color. Now,
the more white there is, the more that color will change. Right,
The less like there is, the more that color will change.
On a different spectrum, so you get the brighter blues,
darker blue, if you get great now, if you if
you want to go over this material again, we do
(25:04):
have a video about the sky and wine is blue
and wine appears to be blue. I will be sure
to include a link to that video on the landing
page for this episode. It's stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. So this naturally flows into the idea of
eye color. Old blue eyes, old blue eyes. Frank Sinatra,
(25:27):
who you know, has you could say the skies and
his eyes in a sense, because the same thing is
kind of happening in the eyeball. Yeah, what we're saying here, Sorry,
so not your fans. Frank's eyes were not really blue,
and in fact, nobody's eyes are really blue or green.
Really Hazel's home, because mine are supposedly green. Sorry dude, Yeah,
(25:49):
I mean mine are kind of gray green. Um. The
the the only true chosen ones out there are people
with the with brown eyes, the only people who are
not trying to pull one over us with an optical
illusion of different colored eyes. And this is because irises
are made up of three layers, a thin top and
(26:12):
back layer with a spongy layer in between called the stroma,
and any layer can have pigmentation in it, and there
are a few different colors of pigmentation that come into
play here. So most people have either dark brown or
yellow pigment in at least one of these layers, and
the combination of yellow and brown go into making brown
(26:33):
and amber colored eyes. So brown people have these pigments
um and each layer of the iris giving the eye
a strong brown color. But when you don't, when you
have sort of different genetic uh deposits of this pigment
in the eye and in the different layers, you have
(26:53):
variation of eye color. Because what I'm talking about here
is is that that brown, let's say that's in the
back layer, could be absorbing all the different spectrum of light. Right.
But let's say that you didn't have any pigmentation in
this trauma, all right, but you have molecules hanging out
in this trauma. Well, what's happening there is that again
(27:16):
that blue light is bouncing around in there because all
the other ones are all the other wavelengths of the
other colors are absorbed by the brown. And then you
have the particles in this trauma that are basically reflecting back,
you know, sort of like the blue sky effect. Wow.
And and this is of course called the the tin
doll effect. Yes, yeah, and and again it is fascinating
(27:36):
because it is pretty much the same scenario that's happening
with the blue sky. It's happening in your eyes, as
weird and kind of magical as that sounds, and it's
kind of beautiful too in a way, even though it's
an illusion. And like right now, if you're a green stare,
you're trying to pull an optical illusion on me. And
in fact, green, by the way, is the blue that's
refracted and a small amount of yellow pigment in that
(27:58):
layer that are in ing. Wow. So, whether you're looking
up into the eternal blue sky uh and uh and
and trying to find some sort of logic there, or
you're just looking into the the eyes of a friend
or loved one, you're you're essentially seeing an illusion. Yes, yeah, yeah.
And babies can often have blue eyes for a few
days or months after birth because the melanin the darkening
(28:20):
pigment of the eyes hasn't fully developed in this stroma
so um. And I've also read that the blue even
in a person's seemingly blue eyes that will actually can
con fade over time as they age. Well, yeah, and
that's because of them. I believe the size of the
molecules in their eyes in the amount of refraction or
reflecting that goes on. Now, if you want to learn
(28:42):
more about this, this is a there's a great article
by Esther Ingle Arcis writing for I O nine and
the article is called physics prove that nobody has blue eyes. So,
as you said in an email to me earlier, take
that Snatra. Yeah, you know. It reminds me that Brent
Spiner had played Data on Star Trek did an album
(29:02):
of I think just like kind of you know, crooner songs,
and they called it Old Yellow Eyes because as Data
on Star Trek the next Generation, he has like yellow
android eyes. There you go, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, he has.
The Data was a beautiful, beautiful character. I like Lord two.
He was all right, Now, what's the effect of someone
(29:24):
with blue eyes staring at you? I guess it would
be different for each person in their personal experience with
blue But of course there exists a study to look
into the psychological effects of blue, especially when it versus red. Yes. Indeed,
get into these these color theories studies. You know, how
does how does the color of a room affect someone's demeanor?
(29:48):
There even if you were not going to discuss them really,
but you know, they look at the how Olympic athletes perform,
how well they perform they're wearing blue versus red? Um,
but in particular, uh, yeah, how does blue effects, say, uh,
performance on a on a test? Right? Well, there's a
(30:09):
two nine study publishing the journal Science, which are where
researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with
six hundred people to answer the question does does does
cognitive performance vary depending on whether you're looking at red
or you're looking at blue and uh surprisingly or unsurprisingly,
and depending on how how much of value place on colors.
(30:32):
The red groups did better on tests of recall and
attention to detail, you know, such as remembering specific words,
checking spelling and punctuation, you know that kind of you know,
fine tuning of material. But the blue groups they did
better on tests that required imaginative inventive freethinking, you know,
coming up with with remarkable new ways to utilize this proper,
(30:55):
that proper that element. Yeah, and if you're wondering about
the mechanist, I'm here of how it was done. The
participants performed tasks with words or images displayed against red, blue,
or neutral backgrounds on computer screens. UM. And I believe
there have been studies too in which people were housed
in blue or red rooms, certainly pink ones. We've talked
(31:17):
about that before. UM, But I'm not surprised that blue
would be perceived as a creativity booster because I think
there's a calming effect here at play, and we know
that when your brain can settle in calm, then it
feels like it had a little bit more room to
play and to use its imagination. Yeah, and plus you
could say, all right, if you're if you're staring up
(31:38):
at a clear blue sky, then you probably you know
there's there's not as much mystery there, like all is
pretty much exposed. If you're staring at the blue water scene,
you're presumably not in the water, and then you don't
have to worry about what's underneath it. Maybe it allows
a little just just clearing of the of the work
desk of the mind. Well, it's interesting too in my
(31:58):
headspace app, just the meditation app that we um use
the andy put a comb. The person who leads the
guided Meditations always talks about getting in that blue sky space.
He says to look at any thoughts as he sort
of gray clouds passing by. So already there's this idea that, yeah,
(32:21):
you're you're in some sort of other I don't want
to say altered state, but other space in which there's
a sort of clarity. Likewise, red would be easy association.
There is, of course blood. In fact, if you had
a list associations for red, I would say, like the
first fifty or sixty would all just be blood, one
listed after another. Yeah. My daughter has said she doesn't
(32:42):
like the color red because she thinks about blood. Yeah,
but of course she has been exposed to a lot
of Star Wars and Ninjago and I don't know, well,
just with life Savers, right, the Sith Lords all used
red light stavers, if I'm not mistaken. All the the
(33:02):
Jedi they do they use all used blue, and then
Luke had a green one, or is it the other
way around? I cannot remember, but I do recall that
Darth Maul has the right living red lightsaber, but not
only that he has the red and black markings on
his face which are very ferocious looking. Yes, yeah, so
he's Yeah, he's definitely a good spokes creature for the
(33:24):
color red, like very much just taking on red. It's
this red, demonic aggressive color as opposed to a more
you know, a more peaceful Jedi would presumably have a
blue lightsaber interest in nice soothing blue tones. Well, and
if you decided to decorate your face with blue instead
of red and black, will you'd just be part of
the blue man group. Right, There's not much threatening even
(33:46):
if even if you really look at him and you
start getting a little creaked out, you can only feel
so threatened by the blue Man group, you know. Final
final note on that, there was an article in The
New York Times potion two thousand nine by Pam Belloic
titled reinvent wheel blue Room diffusing a bomb red room Um.
She pointed out that at the New York Times at
(34:07):
the time there were no blue rooms. There were red rooms,
but no blue rooms. So you can imagine, especially you
have tight deadlines in place, it's all about like getting
the story right, getting the story out on time, that
it would probably be a pretty red room environment. Yeah,
then the saying the article that the walls were painted
a tomato soup red. Yeah. Yeah, again, keep keeping you
(34:30):
on your toes, keeping you aggressive, I can, I could
see that in the place though. And lusty and lusty
that's the other association with red. Yeah, And there there
have been some interesting studies along those lines that you know,
that show that you know, man sees a woman that
gets the red background or in a red outfit. Uh,
there's going to be more. He's gonna interpreter is more
beautiful or sexual? Uh, that sort of thing. Yeah, red
(34:52):
is a very fascinating color. And I think this all
just points to this idea that these colors are working
on us in sub conscious ways, um, in ways that
we cannot even perceive given the machinery that we have
in our eyeballs. And so we may cover a couple
of other colors, UM be interested to know from you guys,
(35:13):
if you have a favorite that you'd want to know about. Well,
you know, it gets right into symbolism too, because we
we end up loading in associations with certain colors, uh,
sports teams, cultural things such as Marty Grass. When we
were getting test colors and test designs for our website
a while back, one of the designs we were given
(35:33):
was a brilliant like purple and gold design, and I
think we both just said, now, that's just that looks
like we're celebrating Marty Grass. It's not really what we're
gonna go for. Um, there's a lot of that at play.
Like someone might say I like these colors because they
look kind of Rastafarian, and others might say that it
looks a little too rastera for what I'm trying to
do here. Uh, please keep those colors to yourself. Yeah,
(35:54):
for my money, it's pink, because recently you had sent
me an article with the tie I don't this pink
even exist? Or pink doesn't exist, And there's all the
sort of implications that pink has had, and historically it's
fascinating color. So maybe maybe we'll get around to do that.
One in the West used to be a man's color
and then when we lost it. Yeah, yeah, it's hard
(36:17):
to think of that now. All right, all right, so
there you go. Blue. Uh, an exploration of the color blue,
what it means to us and how we perceive it
and and where it came from. Now, if you would
like to explore more on this topic, or other topics,
other color related topics. Be sure to check out stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's
(36:38):
where we'll find all the podcast episodes, all the blog post,
all the videos. There's a search bar at the top
of that. So there's a topic that you're interested in,
go plug the word insto what we have on on it,
and if you don't find anything, well, get in touch
with us and let us know you want some coverage
on that topic. In the meantime, you can share your
blue or red or pink thoughts with us, and you
can do that by sending an email to below the
(37:00):
mind of at how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com. H
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to well your mind.
My name is Robert lamp and Um Julie Douglas. Julie,
we are podcasting on a very gray day. Fog has
not lifted for days, right that the sky is just
(00:24):
totally gray. My son keeps asking where sign where? Where
where do you go? And I have to begin to
explain rudimentary celestial mechanics to it, and the need to
test the same question again and then ask where where
is the blue sky? Well? And I think that is
the power of the blue sky in our lives, right,
(00:47):
It's depicted everywhere, It's we we were talking about this.
In children's books. You don't often see gray skies depicted.
You see blue skies. Will you do? In the Lorax,
which is my son's favorite book for seemingly forever, now,
very blue skies as well? Well? You have to because
of the small took skies of course, yes, Um, But
(01:08):
you know, I think blue is one of those really
important colors to us because on some physical level but
also subconscious level, it in end caps our visual field
that we think of when we think about our existence.
It's the color of the sky and the color of
the ocean. Um. And yet this is the thing about
blue is the ultimate magician, appearing mostly as an illusion,
(01:33):
which will discuss in a bit. Yeah, it's a it's
a powerful color. Uh. You know, we're gonna get into
some of the color theory in a bit that. Yeah.
I mean, it's the it's the color ultimately of the
of the sky and ocean. It's kind of the color
of emotion itself. I mean, people seeing the blues. Uh.
Picasso went through his blue period. Like I can't like
(01:56):
when I think of blue in terms of its just
emotional power, So I always end up picturing the uh
the picture of the Picasso did the old guitarist, you know,
where the very also kind of gray looking guitarist is
sending there his head bowed and looks old and tired
and sad, and he's just you know, caked in blue shades. Um.
I Also, I feel like with blue, I think back
(02:19):
a lot two times when I was a kid looking
up at like a really clear blue sky and there
being something comforting but also kind of oppressive about it,
you know. And uh, And I think about that a
lot too, especially if I'm if I'm far from home
and I look up and see that blue sky, there's
something there's something comforting and universal about it, but also
universal and in the same way that death is universal.
(02:42):
You know, it's that relentless blue and it's the relentless
light of the sun. Right, there's nothing to filter it.
I mean, is it any wonder that modern Mongolians still
pray to uh munk punk Kingary the eternal blue sky?
Is it any wonder? Ultraman Ultramarine is the pigment often
reserved to paint the mantle of a virgin Mary. By
(03:03):
the way, so she is typically seen with a very
blue color scheme. Indeed, so there are all sorts of associations.
For me, it's Miles Davis kind of blue, so in
that synesthesia sense. Okay, so you listen to Miles Davis
seeing the blues and you actually kind of well, he
has an album called kind of Blue and um, so
(03:27):
I always think of it's a sort of rainy night
music and it's a it's a very concentric patterned um
type of album, and that each song builds on this
familiar pattern, which kind of messes with it a bit.
But so for me, it's that that's space of jazz
and blues and melancholy. And again, I feel like I've
(03:48):
been talking about this a lot lately, the space the
absence um. But you know, again, the blue can be anything.
It can be that baby blue, um, it can be
Prussian blue, Turk boys blue, very hippyish to me, hey,
And indeed than you have that whole literally gray area
where blue touches gray and then you lose yourself and
(04:08):
like the German grays and German blues melding together bahlsi
and blues yah. On the color spectrum, it's wedged between
violet and green. It has a wavelength between four hundred
and fifty and four hundred nanometers, and blues with a
higher frequency and a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet,
(04:32):
while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength
gradually appear more green. Now pure blue that kind of
you said, have that sort of existential angst too. In
the middle has a wavelength of four hundred and seventy nanometers.
And we'll discuss this later, but this just happens to
be the range of um of color that we perceive
(04:54):
the most with the human eye. And of course I
should also mention that blue is my son's face, a
color which I find curious because we've my wife and
I have done no like coaxing along those lines, like
his his room is green, and we're not we're not
shoving a lot of like blue for boys, pink for
girls kind of thing down his throat. But he's he's
(05:15):
he's just, without question, latched onto blue is his favorite color.
And you ask him he likes blue. If he get
picks out his own shirt animal designs aside, he's going
to go for blue every time. Yeah, my daughter who's
six years old, also loves blue. I love blue. And
what this is pointing to is that there's sort of
a universal um gravitational force of blue over us. In
(05:37):
two thousand and eleven, Deluxe Paints conducted a survey involving
response from thirty different countries and found that across cultures,
blue was the preferred color among men and among women.
Now you're probably wondering, what else, what about the other
colors out there? The second favorite colors are red and green,
followed by orange, brown, brown, and purple. Brown is good.
(06:02):
Brown is an earth tone. My yoga man is brown,
so is poop all right, and then yellow is the
least favorite color, preferred only by five percent of people. Wow,
I'm so glad that yellow is half the color on
our our logo. But there, yeah, but we didn't choose that.
We just it's for you five percent out there. We're
(06:23):
looking after you. Another interesting finding is that both men
and women increasingly dislike orange as they age. Interesting. I've
heard before about orange being an unsettling color, like um,
if I remember correctly, the torture chamber in David Cronenberg's
video Drone is orange and color because they designed it
(06:45):
with some color theory in mind that said that orange
is a very unsettling color and is ideal if you
have an interrogation. I'm setting inmates right sometimes wear orange?
Or is that just? Is that just the show was
they would show up if they escape, because again, who
would wear orange? Who's gonna wear a full orange jumpsuit?
(07:06):
And unless they've escaped from prison? If I'm like orange
a lot, yeah, I mean I'm not opposed to it.
I did go to a university whose color was orange,
and that kind of turned me against it a little bit,
I guess, but you know, but by and large, I
don't have anything against orange. Alright, Okay, well let's think
about six hundred million years ago, when things were just
(07:31):
business as usual. The sun was shining in the Earth
was absorbing and reflecting that light, and uh, really, nobody
knew any better about what sort of colors were being
produced because there was no organism that could perceive that
light and color yet. Yeah. I mean, as far as
the organisms actual pigmentation goes, you could have bright red,
(07:52):
you could have a gray organism over here, sort of
translucent over here. But it doesn't really matter because what
limited kind of perception is going on is really just
more about light and dark. It's not it's about about it.
So the sun is up, the sun is down, the
moon is out. It's that kind of navigational, uh, sensory input.
But in terms of what color anything is, it does
(08:13):
not matter at all. Yeah. And now think about the
Earth and all of the vegetation and the creatures that
we're leaving living on it. Six hundred million years ago,
a lot of the colors and plants and animals um
came from and continued to come from, pigments, colored chemicals
that absorb certain wavelengths of light. And these pigments while
(08:35):
we think of them is more like ornamental today because um,
you know, we've largely hacked them that way our evolution
has um. They have been helpful in other ways. Granules
of melanin, for example, help keep bird feathers strong and
help protect human skin from the sun. And chlorophyll is
a chemical that helps plants trap light for photosynthesis. It
(08:55):
also makes them look green. Yeah, because we often we
like a colorful bird and we instantly think, oh, what's
colored this way for attention? It's all about a visual
presentation or it's about camouflage. But their actual structural properties
that are essential here, Yeah, and we tend to think
of them more as like color currency. Now again, peacock's
this this amazing display that is meant to attract a mate.
(09:21):
But those are things again that got hacked in evolution. Um,
it wasn't until a predator with eyesight showed up on
the scene that this became important. Color became important, and indeed,
according to the NPR story how Animals Hack the Rainbow
and got stumped on blue, this animal is probably like
a super fast shrimp creature. It's suddenly it has eyes,
(09:45):
it can see, it can pick up on colors. And
so if you happen to belong to a species of say,
bright red, little floaty, slimy invertebrate creatures up and all.
Now it hadn't mattered that you're bright red, but suddenly
here's this superpowered super predator shrimp and you're just sticking
out like a sore delicious thumb. Right. And as eyesight
(10:09):
evolves in creatures and as other creatures respond to it,
then you begin to see animals organism starting to actually
go after camouflage, go after other tactics that would help
them to survive with the colors that they have. Yeah,
I mean, and it's it really gets just increasingly complex.
Uh as as organisms evolved, so you end up with
(10:32):
just this this perplexing maze of interactions that we continue
to try and understand where you have bright colors on
one creature or saying stay away from me, and the
other hand is saying come closer, have a taste, and
then other times they're saying, please confuse me with the
other creature that this color just like me that happens
to be poisonous. It gets very complicated, very Yeah, you
have the whole pantone spectrum in there, and a bunch
(10:55):
of reasons for them. As you have just pointed out
a few Now, the majority of color earths are produced
by pigments, now particles of the color chemicals that we
talked about, and these are found within specialized cells. And
these include melanins, which are found in nearly all organisms
and produce more of the earth tones that you see
that that are pretty common even to us, right as humans.
(11:17):
And then you have carotenoids, which or carotenoids which produce
colors primarily in the red to yellow end of the spectrum.
So think about say, flamingos, they're pink because they're eating
carotenoid rich shrimp. Yeah, you look at like a baby flamingo.
They're not pink. They're not born pink, they're born kind
(11:39):
of gray. It's only through that diet that they end
up uh stealing the pigments and incorporating them into their diet, right,
And it's a really easy way to eat pink b pink. Right.
Then you would think the same thing would apply to
colors like blue and green, but it would be wrong
because it's really hard to replicate these colors into the
(12:01):
skin or feathers through diet. By the way, if if
humans eat enough carotenoids, generally through carrots, you can actually
adjust the color in your eyes just a little bit,
but nothing on the scale of changing your actual skin color. Um.
Of course, if you eat beats, which also have carotenoids,
you will see other color alternations take place. We talked
(12:24):
about this in the Biospheriens, Right, they had a diet
of sweet potatoes so much so that their skins, right,
they actually eat enough sweet potatoes to change their skin color. Yeah,
if your diet is extreme, Um, you can actually get
in on the flamingo ritual here if you want to
do that, a diet a sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes only. Now,
(12:46):
even I were talking about how the fact that green
isn't created in skinner feathers easily seems counterintuitive because you
look around and you look at the earth and it's
just full of green vegetation, right, Yeah, I mean, it's
one thing to think about blue as being this sort
of difficult to obtain pigment because you know, mine instantly
(13:10):
turns back to say the Radio Lab episode where they
talked about the possibility that the sky isn't really blue,
that it's all just about us being told that it's blue.
And I think about Oliver Sacks and as the book Hallucinations,
you know, seeking after indigo and uh and and taking
hallucinogens in order to to perceive like pure inhuman indigo.
(13:30):
And then you you've taken all that information, you can say,
all right, I can see where blue would not really
be a thing per se in in in the course
of evolution. But green, yeah, green is everywhere. Green would
it would be vital to your ability to camouflage yourself.
And in fact, we see so many different green creatures,
but when you get right down to it, we don't
(13:51):
really have that much green, uh in the natural world. No.
And in fact, there's a bit of color mixing for
some animals. So if you see a green frog out
in nature, it's not necessarily that they're eating a bunch
of chlorophyll and they're they're turning green. It's that they're
actually color mixing within the skin and using those pigments
pigments to produce that that green coloration. Yeah, it's a
(14:13):
yellow pigment and a blue structural color and the two
end up combining into this green effect. Yeah. Now, um,
so far in terms of blue, only two vertebrates have
been found that have blue coloring as a result of
cellular pigment called cyanaphores, and both the mantarin fish and
the closely related psychedelic mandarin called the picturesque dragonette, are
(14:37):
vividly colored fish native to coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean. Indeed,
but then it turns out that some of the sort
of more iconic blue creatures are are not really blue
at all. For instance, the blue morphoe butterfly, which is
beautiful creature, very picturesque example of blue. This is the one,
(14:59):
for instance, you've find it in Costa Rica, places like that,
and uh, and there was the famous situation where someone
forget which publication cinephotographer down to get a picture of one,
and they're actually very difficult to picture, to photograph their
wings open while they're they're they've landed, and so the
photographer just got a dead one and pinned it up
and then took the picture and it was there's like
(15:21):
a mild controversy over it, but it's a it's a
very blue looking wing surface. But it turns out that
you have tiny transparent structures on the surface of their
wings that bounce light in just the right way to
give them the appearance of this vibrant, rich blue. It's
really brilliant because on one side they're brown, and the
(15:43):
effact that's what you end up getting when you try
to photograph them. Most of the time, you just set
these brown wings and the effect of it being brown
on that side is to absorb all the other color
from the other wavelengths, so orange and yellow. And in
the meantime, on the other side, as you say, it's
got there was any transparent structures, and that is what
bounces the light. And of course, as we sort of
(16:05):
alluded to at the beginning of this, blue is the
wavelength that comes through the best, and so that's what's
bounced off the most through the atmosphere and off of
their wings, or at least one side. Now, if you
doubt this as an optical illusion, as the ultimate optical illusion,
you could grind up their wings and you would see
(16:27):
that there was not a speck of blue pigment in them,
only brown. If you wanted to grind up that seems terrible,
but yeah, well, ground up butterfly wings. Imagine that's an
ingredient and in some sort of which is brew I
mean sure, sure, yeah, but yeah, the crazy thing about
this is it all comes around essentially to meta materials.
You know, we're constantly running across new new studies have
(16:49):
been published new findings where they have some sort of
crazy new meta material where we're manipulating uh, surface structures
at a at a very minute level, and in doing so,
we're changing the ability of the substance to you know,
absorb or to shed a substance you know, shed water,
absorb water, or in the way that admit it manipulates light.
I instantly think back to the Tavanta black that we discussed.
(17:11):
You know, we have this menty materials that make this
this uh, this substance appear the surface appear blacker than
any natural black in our world. And essentially you have
you know, nature has been doing this since time out
of mind. It's been been working at that that minute
scale to manipulate the way the way that we perceive color. Yeah.
(17:34):
You and I were talking about solar sales earlier, and
we were saying, we're like, we're so proud of ourselves
as humans for creating this this material that can reflect
light and can do a bunch of things in the meantime,
you have these butterfly wings that are doing the same
sort of things on this smaller scale, albeit uh for
(17:54):
different reasons. Now, there's a two thousand and twelve study
that found that some birds use bubble laced keratin. This
is the same sort of stuff that you find in
human fingernails in the barbs of their feathers, and it
scatters the light from the feather in a way that
happens to look blue to humans. And Northern Woodlands Magazine
said a simple way to test this out is to
(18:17):
take a blue feather, hold it up to the sky
so that's back lit, and with the sunlight streaming through
the feather rather than bouncing off its surface, the blue
color vanishes and you just get this sort of drab
grayish brown. But if you bring the feather down so
that the light bounces off of it and scatters the
blue wavelengths of light, the feather then appears blue once again,
(18:37):
and this is called structural coloration. You know, then the
more we study this, the more it seems clear that,
you know, we have this this naive version of reality
in which they're just these pure colors, sort of Crayola
understanding of the world. You have all these pure colors
floating around, and some pages are are our color with
(18:59):
certains and others with other crayons. But it's really it's
almost like there are no real colors at all. When
you start breaking it down, it just gets it gets,
this gets so murky. Well, so when you consider other
organisms out there, like bees there they are perceiving ultra
violet lights that that we don't um. But yeah, I agree,
(19:19):
it's kind of funny to think of all the things
that are going on that we do not perceive. Because
I was thinking about again that feather, because you've got
that keratin structure, and there's a layer of melanin and
that is also working with the So the caratin is
bouncing off stuff and the melanin is absorbing red and
yellow wavelengths. So all that is going on, but we
(19:41):
don't see it. Now, if you want to talk about
a really fantastic blue that occurs in nature, or again
appears to occur in nature, uh, and we're talking like
supernormal stimuli level of blue, then you have the berry
of the Polia condensed sata plant, which has an exceedingly blue,
(20:04):
like reflectively intense blue that is just more potent than
any other living creatures. Blue. Yeah, yeah, that's that's what
uh old Rick Steiner, a physicist says about it. It It
says that it's reflectivity is really more intense than any
living thing. And he said most services reflect just a
small percentage of the light that hits them. However, this
(20:26):
berry reflects thirty of the light. The berry skin itself
has no pigment, no colored cells, or I should astric
that um. But all the cells are coiled in the
sort of twist, and the cells form sheets just like
the skin of an onion, and that allows light to
filter down through the layers in a way that creates
(20:47):
again that structural coloration that I was talking about with
the feather. And there's just a few cells in the
berry skin that do reflect other colors, and that is
what gives the fruit what Center calls a pick selated glow. Wow,
so you have you have a few pigments in there,
but then most of it is just completely structural color.
You look at this thing again, you think of it
(21:08):
in Crayola terms, and you think, wow, that that berry
is really painted with a nice blue. But there's there's
it's it's mostly just a matter of structurally altering the
way that the lights playing with it. Yeah, and there's
a good reason for this too. I mean, this is
a very tiny berry, so in a sense, it needs
(21:28):
to do this. It needs to be able to reflect
more white so that it can have the sort of
brilliant blue that as a beacon two birds to come
and eat it and spread it, spread the seeds. It's
it's basically like the it's the smaller business that has
blown its entire advertising budget on a really catchy Super
Bowl at Yeah, I was gonna say it's a snapple
(21:50):
of sodas. Maybe I'm not sure if that fits. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will discuss more about the color blue, uh, particularly
how plays into your eyes. All right, we're back, And
(22:11):
before we talk about the color blue of eyes and
and whether it actually even exists, we should talk about
the blue sky and whether it actually exists. Right, Yeah,
you get into this discussion. He's the sky actually really blue?
And where do we even get that idea? Is it
just something that we we hear about. We hear people
(22:31):
talk about the blue sky, Like didn't I don't remember
telling my son that the guy is blue. Did he
indeed just pick that up from a book where he
sees a more vivid depiction of blue and it looks
like his shirt that he's told as blue. Did somebody
at school say, hey, this guy is blue? Or is
there an innate blueness to the sky? Well, you've probably
heard the explanation before that, because the earth is covered,
(22:52):
you know, with water, that it's the This sky is
just reflecting that back. But that's not actually what's happening.
Think about the absence of light actually, and think about
what happens when we don't have light up in the
sky when it's dark. You know, you get the stars
coming out, and the sky appears to be a black
velvet color because of course we don't have any light
(23:13):
from the sun. But once the sun is up and
the rays of light play with particles in the air,
right that the gas molecules, then you have this interaction
of light and particles, and it looks kind of split
that white light. For a second, let's put it through
a prism. If we do that, we know we get
(23:33):
Roy G. BIV. And we know that each of those
color components of this rainbow of colors has different wavelengths,
And it turns out that the shorter the wavelength, the
more these colors will scatter in the atmosphere when the
sun is up, you know, during the day, and the
more our eyes will perceive them. I mean, that's sort
(23:57):
of the short and dirty answer here. Yeah, So essentially
about the scattering of that blue light, and that's why
we perceive this guy is blue. Yeah, because think about
You've got oxygen and nitrogen molecules dominating the atmosphere and
they're relatively small, and so these are interacting really well
with the wavelengths of indigo. Yes, and you're probably thinking
(24:21):
right now, indigo. Well, then why why doesn't this guy
appear much darker like indigo to us? Well, the second
part of the answer to why this guy is blue
is that the mechanics of our eyes are pretty flawed.
We can't actually perceive that color as it is, and
so are I. Our machinery does a little bit of
(24:43):
pigmentation itself. It takes some of that white light, mixes
it with indigo, and you get more of a blue color. Now,
the more white there is, the more that color will change. Right,
The less like there is, the more that color will change.
On a different spectrum, so you get the brighter blues,
darker blue, if you get great now, if you if
you want to go over this material again, we do
(25:04):
have a video about the sky and wine is blue
and wine appears to be blue. I will be sure
to include a link to that video on the landing
page for this episode. It's stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. So this naturally flows into the idea of
eye color. Old blue eyes, old blue eyes. Frank Sinatra,
(25:27):
who you know, has you could say the skies and
his eyes in a sense, because the same thing is
kind of happening in the eyeball. Yeah, what we're saying here, Sorry,
so not your fans. Frank's eyes were not really blue,
and in fact, nobody's eyes are really blue or green.
Really Hazel's home, because mine are supposedly green. Sorry dude, Yeah,
(25:49):
I mean mine are kind of gray green. Um. The
the the only true chosen ones out there are people
with the with brown eyes, the only people who are
not trying to pull one over us with an optical
illusion of different colored eyes. And this is because irises
are made up of three layers, a thin top and
(26:12):
back layer with a spongy layer in between called the stroma,
and any layer can have pigmentation in it, and there
are a few different colors of pigmentation that come into
play here. So most people have either dark brown or
yellow pigment in at least one of these layers, and
the combination of yellow and brown go into making brown
(26:33):
and amber colored eyes. So brown people have these pigments
um and each layer of the iris giving the eye
a strong brown color. But when you don't, when you
have sort of different genetic uh deposits of this pigment
in the eye and in the different layers, you have
(26:53):
variation of eye color. Because what I'm talking about here
is is that that brown, let's say that's in the
back layer, could be absorbing all the different spectrum of light. Right.
But let's say that you didn't have any pigmentation in
this trauma, all right, but you have molecules hanging out
in this trauma. Well, what's happening there is that again
(27:16):
that blue light is bouncing around in there because all
the other ones are all the other wavelengths of the
other colors are absorbed by the brown. And then you
have the particles in this trauma that are basically reflecting back,
you know, sort of like the blue sky effect. Wow.
And and this is of course called the the tin
doll effect. Yes, yeah, and and again it is fascinating
(27:36):
because it is pretty much the same scenario that's happening
with the blue sky. It's happening in your eyes, as
weird and kind of magical as that sounds, and it's
kind of beautiful too in a way, even though it's
an illusion. And like right now, if you're a green stare,
you're trying to pull an optical illusion on me. And
in fact, green, by the way, is the blue that's
refracted and a small amount of yellow pigment in that
(27:58):
layer that are in ing. Wow. So, whether you're looking
up into the eternal blue sky uh and uh and
and trying to find some sort of logic there, or
you're just looking into the the eyes of a friend
or loved one, you're you're essentially seeing an illusion. Yes, yeah, yeah.
And babies can often have blue eyes for a few
days or months after birth because the melanin the darkening
(28:20):
pigment of the eyes hasn't fully developed in this stroma
so um. And I've also read that the blue even
in a person's seemingly blue eyes that will actually can
con fade over time as they age. Well, yeah, and
that's because of them. I believe the size of the
molecules in their eyes in the amount of refraction or
reflecting that goes on. Now, if you want to learn
(28:42):
more about this, this is a there's a great article
by Esther Ingle Arcis writing for I O nine and
the article is called physics prove that nobody has blue eyes. So,
as you said in an email to me earlier, take
that Snatra. Yeah, you know. It reminds me that Brent
Spiner had played Data on Star Trek did an album
(29:02):
of I think just like kind of you know, crooner songs,
and they called it Old Yellow Eyes because as Data
on Star Trek the next Generation, he has like yellow
android eyes. There you go, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, he has.
The Data was a beautiful, beautiful character. I like Lord two.
He was all right, Now, what's the effect of someone
(29:24):
with blue eyes staring at you? I guess it would
be different for each person in their personal experience with
blue But of course there exists a study to look
into the psychological effects of blue, especially when it versus red. Yes. Indeed,
get into these these color theories studies. You know, how
does how does the color of a room affect someone's demeanor?
(29:48):
There even if you were not going to discuss them really,
but you know, they look at the how Olympic athletes perform,
how well they perform they're wearing blue versus red? Um,
but in particular, uh, yeah, how does blue effects, say, uh,
performance on a on a test? Right? Well, there's a
(30:09):
two nine study publishing the journal Science, which are where
researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with
six hundred people to answer the question does does does
cognitive performance vary depending on whether you're looking at red
or you're looking at blue and uh surprisingly or unsurprisingly,
and depending on how how much of value place on colors.
(30:32):
The red groups did better on tests of recall and
attention to detail, you know, such as remembering specific words,
checking spelling and punctuation, you know that kind of you know,
fine tuning of material. But the blue groups they did
better on tests that required imaginative inventive freethinking, you know,
coming up with with remarkable new ways to utilize this proper,
(30:55):
that proper that element. Yeah, and if you're wondering about
the mechanist, I'm here of how it was done. The
participants performed tasks with words or images displayed against red, blue,
or neutral backgrounds on computer screens. UM. And I believe
there have been studies too in which people were housed
in blue or red rooms, certainly pink ones. We've talked
(31:17):
about that before. UM, But I'm not surprised that blue
would be perceived as a creativity booster because I think
there's a calming effect here at play, and we know
that when your brain can settle in calm, then it
feels like it had a little bit more room to
play and to use its imagination. Yeah, and plus you
could say, all right, if you're if you're staring up
(31:38):
at a clear blue sky, then you probably you know
there's there's not as much mystery there, like all is
pretty much exposed. If you're staring at the blue water scene,
you're presumably not in the water, and then you don't
have to worry about what's underneath it. Maybe it allows
a little just just clearing of the of the work
desk of the mind. Well, it's interesting too in my
(31:58):
headspace app, just the meditation app that we um use
the andy put a comb. The person who leads the
guided Meditations always talks about getting in that blue sky space.
He says to look at any thoughts as he sort
of gray clouds passing by. So already there's this idea that, yeah,
(32:21):
you're you're in some sort of other I don't want
to say altered state, but other space in which there's
a sort of clarity. Likewise, red would be easy association.
There is, of course blood. In fact, if you had
a list associations for red, I would say, like the
first fifty or sixty would all just be blood, one
listed after another. Yeah. My daughter has said she doesn't
(32:42):
like the color red because she thinks about blood. Yeah,
but of course she has been exposed to a lot
of Star Wars and Ninjago and I don't know, well,
just with life Savers, right, the Sith Lords all used
red light stavers, if I'm not mistaken. All the the
(33:02):
Jedi they do they use all used blue, and then
Luke had a green one, or is it the other
way around? I cannot remember, but I do recall that
Darth Maul has the right living red lightsaber, but not
only that he has the red and black markings on
his face which are very ferocious looking. Yes, yeah, so
he's Yeah, he's definitely a good spokes creature for the
(33:24):
color red, like very much just taking on red. It's
this red, demonic aggressive color as opposed to a more
you know, a more peaceful Jedi would presumably have a
blue lightsaber interest in nice soothing blue tones. Well, and
if you decided to decorate your face with blue instead
of red and black, will you'd just be part of
the blue man group. Right, There's not much threatening even
(33:46):
if even if you really look at him and you
start getting a little creaked out, you can only feel
so threatened by the blue Man group, you know. Final
final note on that, there was an article in The
New York Times potion two thousand nine by Pam Belloic
titled reinvent wheel blue Room diffusing a bomb red room Um.
She pointed out that at the New York Times at
(34:07):
the time there were no blue rooms. There were red rooms,
but no blue rooms. So you can imagine, especially you
have tight deadlines in place, it's all about like getting
the story right, getting the story out on time, that
it would probably be a pretty red room environment. Yeah,
then the saying the article that the walls were painted
a tomato soup red. Yeah. Yeah, again, keep keeping you
(34:30):
on your toes, keeping you aggressive, I can, I could
see that in the place though. And lusty and lusty
that's the other association with red. Yeah, And there there
have been some interesting studies along those lines that you know,
that show that you know, man sees a woman that
gets the red background or in a red outfit. Uh,
there's going to be more. He's gonna interpreter is more
beautiful or sexual? Uh, that sort of thing. Yeah, red
(34:52):
is a very fascinating color. And I think this all
just points to this idea that these colors are working
on us in sub conscious ways, um, in ways that
we cannot even perceive given the machinery that we have
in our eyeballs. And so we may cover a couple
of other colors, UM be interested to know from you guys,
(35:13):
if you have a favorite that you'd want to know about. Well,
you know, it gets right into symbolism too, because we
we end up loading in associations with certain colors, uh,
sports teams, cultural things such as Marty Grass. When we
were getting test colors and test designs for our website
a while back, one of the designs we were given
(35:33):
was a brilliant like purple and gold design, and I
think we both just said, now, that's just that looks
like we're celebrating Marty Grass. It's not really what we're
gonna go for. Um, there's a lot of that at play.
Like someone might say I like these colors because they
look kind of Rastafarian, and others might say that it
looks a little too rastera for what I'm trying to
do here. Uh, please keep those colors to yourself. Yeah,
(35:54):
for my money, it's pink, because recently you had sent
me an article with the tie I don't this pink
even exist? Or pink doesn't exist, And there's all the
sort of implications that pink has had, and historically it's
fascinating color. So maybe maybe we'll get around to do that.
One in the West used to be a man's color
and then when we lost it. Yeah, yeah, it's hard
(36:17):
to think of that now. All right, all right, so
there you go. Blue. Uh, an exploration of the color blue,
what it means to us and how we perceive it
and and where it came from. Now, if you would
like to explore more on this topic, or other topics,
other color related topics. Be sure to check out stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's
(36:38):
where we'll find all the podcast episodes, all the blog post,
all the videos. There's a search bar at the top
of that. So there's a topic that you're interested in,
go plug the word insto what we have on on it,
and if you don't find anything, well, get in touch
with us and let us know you want some coverage
on that topic. In the meantime, you can share your
blue or red or pink thoughts with us, and you
can do that by sending an email to below the
(37:00):
mind of at how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com. H
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