May 27, 2023 • 41 mins
Science doesn't have a good explanation for why we sense color, yet it is everywhere and affecting us all the time. But why should minutely different wavelengths of light have such an impact on our moods and motivations? Explore these questions and more with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everybody, This is Chuck here. Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I hope you're doing well. Do you want to know
how color works? There's a lot to it and you
can learn it all right now. This one is from
May twenty first, twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant and Jerry and it's stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Color and technical color.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
Yeah, which is really something.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
It's tea technical.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, imagine what it was like back then. Oh man,
I'll debut.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Just melted people's eyes all bait probably did. You're like, wow,
how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
I'm great.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
I'm glad to hear that.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah, how are you?
Speaker 4 (00:54):
I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm good.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
I got to precurely to study.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Oh yeah, I had to get up early to make
the cheese.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
What oh you know it's just saying.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Don't wait, wait, who's saying, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Make the cheese, make the sausage, make the doughnuts.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I've heard make the doughnuts.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
You never heard make the sausage.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
I've heard you don't want to see how the sausage
is made.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, just pick anything.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Make the cheese, I don't think so cut the cheese,
milk the cow. People get up early for that, so
I guess there's that association.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Have you ever milked a cow?
Speaker 4 (01:29):
No? Have you? No?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I was talking to Emily about that the other day
because we went horse riding and I'd never ridden a
horse before.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Oh yeah, it's pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Huh, it's my.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
New favorite thing. Yeah, it was amazing how awesome it was.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Did you jump over anything on the horse?
Speaker 1 (01:44):
No? But we like, you know, trotted up a hill.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Did you shoot a bow and arrow?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
No? I almost fell off though.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
And yeah when he trotted up the hill, I got
like kind of loose in the saddle, as they say.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I was like, whoa, okay, well that's exactly what you
should said, as woe.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Well, no, he was going uphill, so I had to
just keep on trucking. Really, yeah, I didn't want to
stop him. Good for you, man, he was carrying a load.
I felt bad for the horse.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I'm sure he was fine.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, he was all right.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Yeah what was his name?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Oh? Man?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Now I'm kicking myself like a horse because I called
this horse by his name the whole day, and now
I can't remember Calvin.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I thought we'd bonded. I guess I was just pretending.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
That's cool. The horse probably can't remember your name either.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, and he took a big dump. They do that, right,
and then just stopped. And I was like, what are
you stopping for?
Speaker 4 (02:37):
And I was like, oh, oh, you're lucky even stop
sometimes they just walk and do that.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Really, all of the ones on our little ride stopped.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
To poop, which I thought was maybe I'm confusing them
with another animal humans just walking poop at the same time.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Anyway, it was my favorite new thing. I loved it.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
That's cool, man, I felt very at home. What color
was the horse?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
The spotted ones, which I love, man.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
I was hoping you were gonna say, like blue or
red or something easy?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Did you smashed the table?
Speaker 4 (03:07):
Let's go with blue? Okay, blue?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
It was a blue horse.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
So allow me to explain why your horse appeared blue. Okay,
As Newton figured out, that horse was not inherently blue.
There's nothing inherently blue about that horse. Yeah, it's all
in our perception.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, because color technically doesn't exist.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
It exists in our minds.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Well, yeah, the perception of color does exactly, But like
an apple isn't just there's nothing in the apple that's red.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Exactly, chuck, And there's nothing in your horse that made
it blue. Now, what happens is that color is basically
our perception of a specific wavelength of visible light.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
And visible light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum
that includes everything from microwaves to radio waves, to gamma rays.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
To ocean waves.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
Not quite, but visible light is part of that wavepools. No, no, no,
just those things that I said. Okay, So along that
spectrum is this very narrow little slice that's visible light.
And invisible light which we see is like white light, sunlight. Yeah,
(04:22):
it is the presence of the rainbow, which are called
the spectral colors.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
It's right.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
On one end, you have the short wavelength, which is blue.
On the other end, you have the long wavelengths, which is.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Red technically violet.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
On the other side, well, red has a bunch of
different names. When you start reading in the color.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Well, no blue on the blue side, it's like starts
at violet. But we don't perceive it very well.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Oh well, I'm talking about what humans can see, right, Yeah,
and then everything else is in between.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Right, and what's really in the middle, Like yellow, Maybe
it seems like yellow is kind of in the middle.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah. When you think, you tell me.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Well, on the other end, beyond violet, you've got ultraviolet,
and beyond red, you've got infrared.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, these are things we can't see.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
No, we can't. Some animals can, remember they think monarch
butterflies are able to migrate all the way to Mexico
using ultraviolet detecting ultraviolet. I remember that.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Oh yeah, man, that was a good episode, pretty amazing.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
So this band of light, this visible spectrum, contains the
spectral colors which we perceive, right, And for a very
long time, everybody just thought, well, that apple's red or
that horse is blue. That's just how it's born. There's
nothing that can be done about it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
And then like we said, along came Newton, and Newton said, no,
something weird's going on here. Like you said, color doesn't
really exist. It's in the eye of the beholder almost literally. Yeah, right,
And the reason why an apple seems red or your
horse seems blue are because of natural chemicals found in
say the skin of the apple or the hide to
(06:00):
the horse. That are called pigments. So in an apple, specifically,
it's anthrocyanins that make it red. In the case of
a carrot, it's carotenoids, in the case of grass, it's chlorophyll.
And these pigments have the capability of absorbing some wavelengths
of light and reflecting others back. And the wavelength that
(06:22):
it reflects back are the colors that we perceive.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
And that's if it's an object that is opaque.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Well, yeah, that's a big one right there. Yeah, apples
are pretty opaque.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yeah, I would say, so that's your Superman maybe.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Yeah, heats invisible see through apples. Oh yeah he can.
Can I get your joke now? So yeah, with an
opaque object, where light doesn't pass all the way through,
some lights reflected back. So in the case of anthracyanins,
this pigment absorbs all the other wavelengths of light except red,
(07:01):
and it reflects red back, and so red is reflected back.
So what you see when you look at this apple
with all the red light reflecting back at you is
a red apple, that's right. That's how we perceive color
in the world around us. Naturally.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, and if it's transparent, it's not reflecting that light
but transmitting it. So it depends on the color of
light that's passing through it instead of reflecting back to you.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yes, and again it's that chemical makeup.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It operates in sort of the same way, right, It's
just not like in an apple skin, let's say.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Yeah, exactly. But it all comes to do It comes
down to basically pigments or whatever natural chemical or mineral
that either absorbs or reflects certain wavelengths of light.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
So here's the thing though, Chuck, Like that can happen
all day long, and as long as there's not a
human or a monkey, or a dolphin or a dog,
because dogs are not colorblind, that's right. They see and
colors than we do, but they're not color blind.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I always wonder how they do this tests animals.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
Yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I mean, I'm sure it's pretty easy to find out,
but I just didn't have time to look into it.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
I'm with you. Yeah, this is like in massive black
hole of information, Like you could just keep going and
going and going with colors such a huge expansive topic
that we could just do nothing, but color episodes for
the next several months. If we wanted to do you
want to kill me?
Speaker 1 (08:33):
I may not make it through today's.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
So you're doing great. This is fine, This is great, Chuck.
It is a very like big subject. Yes it is, man,
We're just we're providing a brief overview of it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
So, like I was saying, things can reflect color all
the time, but as long as there's not something there
to perceive it, is there any Is there really any
color there? Well that's a philosophical question, but there's an
answer to it, and the answer is no.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
If a tree falls in the woods and no one's
around to hear, it doesn't make a noise.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
No. Actually, my opinion on that one is yes, okay.
But with color, yeah, it doesn't exist without being perceived.
I think. Yeah, sound to me is different than.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
It's a bit of a brain melter. But I see
what you're saying.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Okay. So that leads you to the question of how
do we see color? And that wasn't figured out until
the eighteenth century, and it wasn't proven I think, until
the sixties. And there were a pair of guys who
were a dynamic duo. If I've ever heard of one before,
and what were their names?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Well, Thomas Young, he was I thought he was kind
of the main guy. I had never heard of.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
The other guy, Hermann von Helmholtz.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, Thomas Young. What I read was that he was
the first to propose the trichromatic theory. Basically that we
see everything through red, green, and blue channels because that's
how our eyes pick up on color.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Yeah, because we have specialized cells in our eyes called cones, right, Yeah,
I think we have something like one hundred million or
some ridiculous amount of rods. And rods are the things
that we see in like fine detail, black and white typically, right. Yeah,
Cones are color perceiving cells, and each cell is specialized
(10:18):
to you either attuned to wavelengths that red, green, or blue.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, you have way more rods than cones, about one
hundred and twenty million rods in each eye and only
only about six million cones in each eye.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
And those cones are concentrated mostly in the front of
your retina, Yeah, in the middle, right, which is why
you don't see color peripherally quite as well.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
So these cells are attuned to different wavelengths, right. The
long wavelengths are red, medium is green, and short is blue.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I thought you said medium was yellow.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
No, that's in the middle.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Oh okay, right, so medium is not in the middle.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
Well as far as our RGB goes, gotcha, okay. And
so with these cells, Chuck, if you're looking at your
blue horse, what was his name, Calvin the blue horse. Yeah,
so if you're looking at Calvin the blue horse, you're
getting a lot of information on from short wavelength light, yes,
(11:19):
not so much at the long or medium wavelengths, right,
And so there's probably a little bit it's not a
true blue horse, right, which would mean that it was
a totally saturated blue, which is only that blue wavelength,
true blue wavelength coming to your eyes, there's probably a
little bit of green, a little bit of red. And
(11:40):
so all the cones in your eyes are getting all
this information at once, and they're reporting to your brain
via electrical impulses about the quality of the wavelengths of
light that they're getting, and so your brain takes it
and basically it becomes a color mixer and creates the
color blue that you're seeing Calvin as Yeah, that's how
(12:02):
we detect color. And from the r and the G
and the B you can put together. Supposedly, the Commission
on Illumination, a European Commission on illumination back in nineteen
thirty one determine that humans can see something like two
point three eight million colors.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Oh, i'ds up to one hundred million, now.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
Is it? Because I've seen all over the place in
this The nineteen thirty one CIE findings are the ones
that people say, this has the best science behind it.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Oh really, yeah? Yeah, so one hundred million, no, I'm sorry,
ten million.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Okay, okay. The other thing about the CIE is that
people say, well, this was only under certain types of illumination.
I think three different types of illumination, so it is
entirely possible if you change the intensity or whatever, you're
going to have brand new color. So ten millions reasonable, Okay.
That's a lot of colors that we can see, all
from the red, the green, and the blue cones coming
(12:59):
together and your brain adjusting them and seeing, oh, well
that's burnt sienna.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
I know you're gonna say that, did you. Yeah, that's
sort of the go to joke color, right it is.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
It's pretty joky color.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
It's a good one. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Ten million colors,
or let's say it's two million, if you're going by
the nineteen thirty one model.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah, you know, the CIE naming convention.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Shall we talk about some of the characteristics of color.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
Yeah, but let's take a break first. This is getting heavy,
all right, okay.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
Saish all right.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
So if you actually you can do this on your
modern television as well, But it seemed like most TV's
now kind of come fairly set up.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Yeah, but in the old days, when you had those.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Little wheels to try and get that color right, it
was you know, you might have noticed things that said
hue and intensity or value or tone and all that stuff.
Those are all color characteristics. Yeah, and Hugh specifically is
I mean, that's basically what the color is. It's not
(14:18):
the lightness or the darkness. It's you know, it's the
greenness or the redness or the blueness, right, that's the hue.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
Yeah, it's it's what you can interchange that word with color.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, exactly. I like how they refer to it as
the identity of a color.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Yeah, that sounds kind of personal.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
The intensity is how pure it is. So, like we said,
most colors are mixes. You know, they bleed one way
or the other on the wavelength, but in its purest
form a single wavelength, which is really rare, that would
be the purity or the intensity.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Of the color.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
You're not gonna see that very.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
Often though, No, And I was wondering, like, that's pretty cool.
There's some physics labs some where that can produce pure
saturated green like unadultterated green or unadultraated blue.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
There is, or you're saying, I'm sure it's got to be.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
There has to be. Yeah, probably that has got to
be really something to see. To know, you're looking at green,
like nothing but green. I would like to see that sometime.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, and I have I'm not color blind, but I
have a more difficult time picking out other hues in
a color, whereas Emily's really good, like when picking out
paint colors, like that gray has this and this and
this in it, and I'm like, really like I see gray.
Speaker 4 (15:37):
Well, supposedly a lot of people have a color deficiency.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I might have a slight color deficiency.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
And a lot of people don't realize it. Well, yeah,
a lot of people don't realize that. They think that
this just this color just looks like this and thinks
everybody sees it that way and that's not the case.
And then it comes from a conversation where they're like, well,
wait a minute, what do you mean you see a
distinction between those?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Well, but yeah, but in my case, it's hues. It's
not like I see a completely different color, right, or you.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Know, black, or everything's just looks gray.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I did a brain stuff on color blindness. That's pretty interesting.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I went to research that one time for a show
and it would just like bent my mind so much
I quietly filed it away.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
So I'm sure you'll pick it next week.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Color blindness, Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and
that's basically has to do with light, the energy of
the light that makes it up.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Yeah, and the value is so hues. There's really just
kind of a finite, very finite number of colors of hues, right.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
And you think of like primary colors, which we'll talk
about soon. But when you adjust something, when you adjust
the value of it, yeah, that just creates a whole
new range of colors. So if you add a little
black to a color, what you're doing is shading it.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
If you add white, you are creating a tint.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
And then if you add black and white a gray,
you're toning it.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, right, And I think people interchange those words without
understanding what they mean.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Yeah, but they are definite distinct things, and that we
should probably say. There's a lot of really neat sites
on the internet. Pantone is a really good one, yeah,
where you can go look at color wheels and things
like that and see the distinction between these things and
be like, oh, you mean pastels. That's another word for
a tone.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, And it's a lot of people really get into
it because it's the basis of printing and art and photography,
and like every every sort of art form, well not
every art form, but many art forms boil down the color.
So if you go to art school, you're going to
study color pretty deeply, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
Yeah, And one of the things you're going to study
is color theory. And color theory is based done the
idea that certain colors contrast one another, certain colors complement
one another, certain colors should never be used together. And
not that it's just you know, your instructor serge saying no,
(18:16):
these colors don't go together. It's not just Serge's opinion, right,
These are objective facts as far as color theory goes. Sure,
And it's all based on the idea that all colors
fall into one of two categories. You have additive colors
and subtractive colors.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, and there's a couple of I mean, there's two
distinct applications for both of these. If you're talking about
a computer screen or a television that's using light, so
it's additive. If you're talking about paint or photography that's subtractive.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Right, So you can think of it this way. With
additive colors, you're starting with black and you're adding light
to it, and ultimately, when you add all these additive
colors together, you're going to have white. With subtractive colors,
you start with white, and when you add all these
colors together, you're ultimately gonna have black. And they subtract
by absorbing one another's colors.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Another color mind bender two because with subtractive color, you're
still adding colors, but it's not additive, right, But they're
sort of have to wrap your head around that.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Yeah, but they're subtracting wavelengths by combining colors and absorbing.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Them, right, Yeah, it takes a hue out.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
So a really good example of subtractive colors is if
you take cyan. Cyan absorbs orange, red, right right, So
if you take cyan and you mix it with yellow,
you produce green. And the reason that cyan and yellow
produce green is because the cyan absorbs the red light
(19:51):
and the yellow light. The yellow absorbs blue violet, and
so the only color that's not subtracted or absorbed is green.
So green is produced from these other pigments absorbing all
the other wavelengths. Yeah, and with it additive coloring, additive pigments.
It's it's quite the opposite. You have light combining to
(20:15):
form new colors. Rather than absorbing, you're adding to it.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, And like the apple is an example, like we
said earlier, of a subtractive color system. And again, like
a TV screen would be additive.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Yeah, I think we got that. Yeah, I mean it
is mine bending a little.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Bit some of the stuff, you know, I have to
read like ten times and then it sinks in.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
But the reason that all colors can be turned into
either additive primaries or subtractive primaries is that these are
the six colors of these, they're the six spectral colors.
They're the rainbow colors. Right. So additive primaries are what red, green,
and blue.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
RGB.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Yeah, and then the subtractive colors are cyan, yellow and magenta.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, I was gonna say magenta.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
They're almost like bizarro colors. They're the bizarro world primary colors.
When you think of primary colors, you think of like
the the what red, yellow, and blue is what most
people think of.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeah, Red, yellow, and blue were the traditional primaries, and
they still are, but when it comes to like painting
and printing, they've been replaced with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
Right, cmyk.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah, when you go to your clubhouse printer, Yeah, that's
what you're gonna be.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Seeing, cmyk. Or you can select RGB as well, red, green,
and blue.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
So Crosby Stills Nash and Young, right, right, or Crosby
Stills in Nash.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Okay, that's the difference.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
That's a good rule of thumb.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Man.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
All right, So we mentioned primary colors just a second go,
and then we have our secondary colors green, orange, and
purple hues, which you get from mixing the primary colors, right,
and then you have something called tertiary colors, which is
just furthering the color hues by mixing primary colors with
secondary colors.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Right, So the six tertiary colors and the two sets
of primary colors or the six secondary colors I think,
and the two sets of primary colors form the color
wheelers twelve colors in the color wheel.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, and tertiary colors are the ones that you'll hear
like blue green or red violet. Yeah, it's like literally
named the two colors.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
And color naming is another rabbit hole that you can
go down. There's a sight. Man, I wish I'd written
it down, but it's if you type in like who
names colors or color naming or something like that in Google.
Like one of the first page entries is the site
that you go through and it shows you different colors
(23:01):
and you write what you would name that color? Oh, interesting,
butter yellow or something like that, right, and the whole
well that was as as far as I got. I'm like,
well I would call this butter yellow, and you got
hungary had other things to do. But you can go
through in this. I think it's like ten or twenty
different shades that they show you colors that they show you,
And the whole purpose of all this is to find
(23:26):
some sort of commonality to create universal, universal naming convention
for colors. Yeah, it makes sense because you know, there
is a lot of distinction among languages for naming colors.
But at least one study that I found decided that
all colors universally for societies that do recognize individual colors,
(23:51):
rather than these are just warm colors and these are
cool colors. Yeah, which is universal. The more primary the color,
the shorter and easier to remember the name of it is,
like across cultures. So not all cultures will call it blue,
But what a culture is going to have like another
like short monosyllabic name for that color, for the same
(24:14):
thing that we would call blue.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Oh that's pretty interesting, Yeah, just because it's easier to understand.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
It's just it's basic, like colors appear to be basic universally.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
All right, I think we should take another break and
maybe come back and talk a little bit about how
colors can compliment each other and live in harmony and
what that all means to us.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Okay, s.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
All right, we're back.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
We sure are.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
So we talked about the different primary color, secondary, and tertiary.
And there's also something called complementary colors, which are basically
contrasting colors that make a neutral color when put together, right,
and they are really far apart in hue, as far
apart as they can be. And there if you look
at the color wheel, they're on the complete opposite side
(25:18):
from one another, right, And when you place them next
to each other, then their hue is like, I guess.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
It's just more robust looking, yes, because they complement.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
One another, right, Yeah, complimentary doesn't necessarily mean like, oh,
they look great together under all circumstances. So some complementary colors,
like red and green, if you play them next to
each other in the same intensity and the same size,
it's another one. Yeah, you are going to have what's
(25:50):
called an iceore. I have a shirt like that. It's
just too much equal amounts of bright red and bright green.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Trying to think of that shirt.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
It's just a Christmas shirt?
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Is it retired?
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well for the holiday.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Yeah, it's a holiday. Sure, Okay, But the whole point
of having colors and using colors together isn't just like, well,
these two are opposite the color wheels, So I'm going
to use them and equal amounts and equal intensity and
everything will be great. You have to achieve what's called
color harmony, and in doing that, you want to choose
different different shades or different tones or different tints, and
(26:26):
also different amounts at once. So like you're going to
use a bunch of red and a little bit of
green as an accent. That would be much more harmonious
than equal amounts of intense red and green next to
each other.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Yeah, and again this is when we say it's not
a matter of taste. That's like picking something out as
a matter of taste. But again, these are like scientific rules.
You can't just throw two colors together and say that
looks great or that they're harmonious.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
I mean, I guess you could, but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
You would surge would be like you're wrong. This is
objective stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And then with complimentary colors.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Getting back to that, there's this really cool thing that
they bring up called retinal fatigue. So you can do
a little experiment at home that's kind of blows your mind,
but it really illustrates how color works pretty well. If
you look at a bright red spot for about a minute,
your retinas are going to soak in all that red,
all those cones are and then when you go immediately
(27:22):
and look at a white surface, you're going to see
green briefly, right, not forever, right.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
And the reason why is because your red cells have
just been basically overstimulated and they're going to respond weakly
to the information that they're getting from that white right, Yeah,
And your blue and green cells are going to be
functioning just fine, so they're going to easily overwhelm your
red cells. And so what you'll see is this ghost
image of like a cyan square.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah, which is why. And the reason why is because
red is the complement of green. It'll always be that opposite, right.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
It doesn't just like randomly pick out a color.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
I know. And if you start adding all this stuff
together that there are objectively complementary colors that you see
when you see too much of the opposite one, doesn't
it all seem to fit so cleanly together that you're
almost like what is going on here?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Like?
Speaker 4 (28:18):
What is color? Why do we see color?
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (28:22):
It's a really good question, and evolutionary biologists have not
been able to explain it fully.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, I guess I really never thought about that because
there's well, I mean there's probably some evolutionary benefit, right, sure,
Like green things are generally good to eat.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
Yeah, but green is also the kind of a universal
color for disgust or sickness or illness.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Oh like you're green because you're.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
Green around the gills or something like that.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
Green is often like the color of rot grass. But
it's true. I mean, it's both. So how do we
evolve to understand the nuanced and I mean clearly if
we didn't evolve too sea in color so that we
could do this we have as a byproduct of it,
but we can very easily tick off whether something is
(29:10):
healthy for us dangerous. We get a lot of information
about an object in our environments quality and desirability based
on its color. It's almost like a shorthand that our
brains pick up.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, And part of that is because we're conditioned after
years of using green for go and green for safe passage,
and like red or orange for hazard signs and stop signs.
So part of that's conditioning. But as far as like
going back many many years before we made stop signs,
I have no idea.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
Yeah, you know, it really makes you wonder and even
like the idea that pink is for girls in blue
is for boys, that's a fairly recent development. Prior to
I think the early twentieth century, it was the opposite.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Did we ever do that as a show or didn't
know it's too short? I think we did, like a
video one or something, didn't we Maybe I seem to remember.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
That, But it was the opposite until like the nineteen
hundred's interesting, Yeah, yeah, that's interesting totally.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Is that's why you rock your pink shirts?
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Well, yeah, right, that's exactly why.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
That in fashion.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So getting back to harmonious colors if they are side
by I mean this is if you're like picking out
colors in your house or whatever, if you're not very
good at it, there are a few hard and fast
rules colors that are and get your little color wheel
out is really handy. If they're side by side, they're
going to harmonize well. And like we mentioned, colors directly
(30:39):
across from one another, complimentary ones also go well in
the right proportions because, like you said, the size of
it makes a big difference. They point out in the article.
I don't know if you've ever seen someone who's like
painted their room red, like in college. You know, some
stupid room mate would do that. It's an assault on
your senses because you're not used to seeing that much red, right,
(31:00):
But maybe an accent wall and a shade of red
matched with a complementary color. You wouldn't want to red
in green rim though, I guess green is complimentated or red.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
No, but you could conceivably say, use the complementary color
for like the trim or something like that.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, exactly, And then tints and shades and tones of
the same.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Color are always okay together.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
It's never gonna clash, but you're just gonna have to
mess around with like how much of one compared to
the other and what pleases your eye?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Right, Yes, so there is. You can't clash though.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
No, And so again Surge is saying, like, no, there's
objective truth as to complementary colors and harmonious colors, but
there is also personal preference. Oh sure, And this is
kind of like the thorn in the side of the
whole idea of color psychology that people use colors to
(31:58):
manipulate other people into like buy a product or whatever.
Study after study keeps finding that color preferencing color symbolism, Yeah,
is extremely personal. It's based on past experience, on your upbringing,
on your culture. Like for example, here in the West,
we wear black for mourning.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Well in the East, white is the color for morning.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Right.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
So there's a lot of culturally bound ideas about color too,
which keeps it from being like universally symbolic or whatever.
But that being said, there are some that just from
being exposed to it time and time again, like a
red stoplight that you come to identify symbolically with other stuff.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Yeah, And colors will also affect everyone differently mood wise,
but there are some generalities there too, Like blue is
generally a soothing color that will calm you down. Too
much though could actually have the opposite effect, like too
much blue.
Speaker 4 (32:59):
On some or it can really depress you.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
What blue can Yeah? I wonder if that's why they
say you're blue?
Speaker 4 (33:07):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean think about we describe our world
like that green with envy. Blue means you're down in
the dumps.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Red means you're angry, yeah, red faced, yeah, or red
neck light.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
That's different, it's a little different.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Warm colors, reds and yellows can also lift the spirits
if you're less excitable. And they say that most people
want to just strike a balance though, between the cool
and the warm.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Right, and that's when it comes to like personal preference. Yeah,
but the idea behind this is that a lot of
people don't realize this is going on, that they're being
affected by color, even though they are. That it's on
a very unconscious level.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah, And it also depends a lot on light, like
how much light a room has coming into it, because
you're gonna because sunlight is different than artificial light, your
shirt's going to look a different color outside in the
sun as it might.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
And I remember when we did the TV show there
was a lot of.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
With colors and stuff, you know, things would look different
outside than they would under studio lights.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
What's neat though, is we humans have developed this trick
called color constancy, where if you look at something, even
if it's in the shadow or in the sunlight, it
should conceivably look like different colored things because of the illumination.
But to us, we're still like, no, that's still green,
just because there's you know, shadow blocking it. Now, I
(34:31):
still see it as green. It doesn't make any sense,
and it's kind of perplexed I guess biologists for a
while trying to figure out what this is yor neurologists,
and they figured out that, yes, it is in the brain.
And there was this one guy who had some sort
of brain damage, I think from an electric shock, and
(34:51):
he also went for all intentsive purposes blind, but he
could still see color. What but he didn't have color constancy.
So they figured out that this guy was detecting wavelengths
of light color even though he couldn't see anything. He
could see colors still, but color constancy wasn't there. So
they figured out, well, that means that it's a trick
of the brain. Huh, very neat.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
It's very cool.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
They also bring up in the in the House off
Works article something I think is pretty interesting, how certain,
because of conditioning, certain colors can just appear to be wrong.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Like if you were to pull up and see a
green stop sign, it would freak you out.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Or the example they used to hear is if you
cracked an egg and there was a green egg yolk,
that would be really freaky too, because you're just so
used to that yellow, right, you know.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
You'd think, well, this is diseased or something.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, or doctor seust right, you know what else you got?
Did you look at that thing on pigment?
Speaker 4 (35:49):
I did. There's some wacky ways people have made pigments.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, I mean pigment as far as making paint in things.
Now they're synthetic, you know, like their synthesizing laboratories, which
makes sense. But throughout all of history, up until they
started doing that, they were actual real things in the
ground and on the earth that they would grind up
into powder. In the case of blue, there was a
(36:17):
semi precious stone called er there still is called Lapis
lazuli that was found all over the place in Afghanistan,
and that's how they made blue.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Or Azureite is a blue mineral of copper.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
So all of them, most of them have a few
different ways they could make it red. I think we've
talked about cinnabar before. The mineral is where you get
vermilion red and carmine. Carmine is bright red and that
comes from aluminum salt of carminic acid. So it's just
crazy that they found all these things in the world
(36:53):
to make. And I know blue is the toughest one
because you don't see blue very much in nature. I
think blue is the one you will see least in
the primary colors as far as nature goes, like some insects,
but like there's no blue food.
Speaker 4 (37:08):
Yeah, that's true. Blue horses, No, Well what about mine?
My favorite was India yellow, where they would feed cows
nothing but mango leaves and then collect their urine and
then boil it down, then filter out the concentrated muck
and then make balls out of it. And there was
(37:30):
the basis of your pigment.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
So those are just a few if you really get
into pigments, and you can like go crazy trying to
figure out where they all came from.
Speaker 4 (37:41):
Definitely, And I mean again, this is like really just
the surface of color. There's so much to it, and
I strongly advise you to go out and learn more
about it. Color it's everywhere.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Oh, how about the one last factoid? Why is the
sky blue?
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Oh it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Sky's not really blue.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
No, it shouldn't really have any color. Yeah, but the
angle of the sun coming down on the upper atmosphere
encounters things like water, vapor, and other tiny particles, and
they tend to scatter blue wavelength light more than the
other colors.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Right, that's it.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
So that's just bouncing around at all points, which is
why the sky is blue. It's say, like noontime. But
while the sky's blue at noontime over here, it's say
sunrise or sunset to the east or the west.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:28):
And since all that blue light is getting scattered over
you where it's noontime in the east of the west,
those reds and yellows and pinks are making it all
the way there, and the blue is not, which is
why sunrise and sunset it tends to appear reddish, whereas
like midday appears blue.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah, which is It makes total sense. And when your
kids ask you why is the sky blue, you can
tell them you.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Can tell them like the real reason you can.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
Be like color does not actually exist. Yeah, it's all lie.
Good luck with that and go to sleep. If you
want to know more about color, just type that word
in your favorite search engine or how stuff works dot common.
It will take you on a wild ride. And since
I said wild ride, it's time for listener mail. Uh.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
I'm going to call this something I've never heard of before,
precocious puberty.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Uh you ever heard of that?
Speaker 4 (39:21):
Yes, we talked about it did it early puberty?
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Okay, did we talk about that?
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Yeah, we said it.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
I guess this is in girls, so maybe that's why
it got you.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Surprise me.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
I'm a long time listener, and thanks for helping me
in my commute every day. Really enjoyed and giggled my
way through the episode of male puberty. Thanks so much
for mentioning precocious puberty.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Well, there you have it.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
I was diagnosed at age two after my mom came
to wake me before.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
School one day before I had a full beard.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Now before preschool. This is a lady and she had
started her period at two years old. Wow, And as
you can imagine, my mom was terrified. It took a
long time to get a correct diagnosis since it is
pretty rare. My treatment started out as daily shots that
my mom gave me at home that then went to weekly, monthly,
and annually as a year's progress.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
I also had intermittence days in the hospital for testing.
Speaker 4 (40:14):
Ah, that poor kid.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I know.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Treatment was stopped when I reached twelve years old, essentially
pressing play and my puberty that had been on pause
for almost ten years.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
See that's cool treatment.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that they figured out how
to stall puberty.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
Yeah, they're like stay stay Okay.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
God.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I have only hazy memories of this, of course, as
I was a child, but I do remember that missing
shots caused quite a bit of pain since my.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Body was growing out of control.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Essentially, I've never been able to find out what the
long term effects might be, but I've had a pretty
decent health into my adult life and I'm now thirty
one years old. Awesome, So thanks a lot.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
And that is from Lauren in California.
Speaker 4 (40:54):
Well, thanks a lot, Lauren. Appreciate that we love hearing
from people with real life experiences of stuff where you
just talk about that's right.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
You know.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
If you want to let us know about your real
life experience, we want to hear it. You can tweet
to us at s y SK podcast. You can join
us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
(41:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Hi everybody, This is Chuck here. Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I hope you're doing well. Do you want to know
how color works? There's a lot to it and you
can learn it all right now. This one is from
May twenty first, twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant and Jerry and it's stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Color and technical color.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
Yeah, which is really something.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
It's tea technical.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, imagine what it was like back then. Oh man,
I'll debut.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Just melted people's eyes all bait probably did. You're like, wow,
how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
I'm great.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
I'm glad to hear that.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah, how are you?
Speaker 4 (00:54):
I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm good.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
I got to precurely to study.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Oh yeah, I had to get up early to make
the cheese.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
What oh you know it's just saying.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Don't wait, wait, who's saying, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Make the cheese, make the sausage, make the doughnuts.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I've heard make the doughnuts.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
You never heard make the sausage.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
I've heard you don't want to see how the sausage
is made.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, just pick anything.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Make the cheese, I don't think so cut the cheese,
milk the cow. People get up early for that, so
I guess there's that association.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Have you ever milked a cow?
Speaker 4 (01:29):
No? Have you? No?
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I was talking to Emily about that the other day
because we went horse riding and I'd never ridden a
horse before.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Oh yeah, it's pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Huh, it's my.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
New favorite thing. Yeah, it was amazing how awesome it was.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Did you jump over anything on the horse?
Speaker 1 (01:44):
No? But we like, you know, trotted up a hill.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Did you shoot a bow and arrow?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
No? I almost fell off though.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
And yeah when he trotted up the hill, I got
like kind of loose in the saddle, as they say.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I was like, whoa, okay, well that's exactly what you
should said, as woe.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Well, no, he was going uphill, so I had to
just keep on trucking. Really, yeah, I didn't want to
stop him. Good for you, man, he was carrying a load.
I felt bad for the horse.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I'm sure he was fine.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, he was all right.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Yeah what was his name?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Oh? Man?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Now I'm kicking myself like a horse because I called
this horse by his name the whole day, and now
I can't remember Calvin.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I thought we'd bonded. I guess I was just pretending.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
That's cool. The horse probably can't remember your name either.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, and he took a big dump. They do that, right,
and then just stopped. And I was like, what are
you stopping for?
Speaker 4 (02:37):
And I was like, oh, oh, you're lucky even stop
sometimes they just walk and do that.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Really, all of the ones on our little ride stopped.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
To poop, which I thought was maybe I'm confusing them
with another animal humans just walking poop at the same time.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Anyway, it was my favorite new thing. I loved it.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
That's cool, man, I felt very at home. What color
was the horse?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
The spotted ones, which I love, man.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
I was hoping you were gonna say, like blue or
red or something easy?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Did you smashed the table?
Speaker 4 (03:07):
Let's go with blue? Okay, blue?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
It was a blue horse.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
So allow me to explain why your horse appeared blue. Okay,
As Newton figured out, that horse was not inherently blue.
There's nothing inherently blue about that horse. Yeah, it's all
in our perception.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, because color technically doesn't exist.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
It exists in our minds.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Well, yeah, the perception of color does exactly, But like
an apple isn't just there's nothing in the apple that's red.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Exactly, chuck, And there's nothing in your horse that made
it blue. Now, what happens is that color is basically
our perception of a specific wavelength of visible light.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
And visible light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum
that includes everything from microwaves to radio waves, to gamma rays.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
To ocean waves.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
Not quite, but visible light is part of that wavepools. No, no, no,
just those things that I said. Okay, So along that
spectrum is this very narrow little slice that's visible light.
And invisible light which we see is like white light, sunlight. Yeah,
(04:22):
it is the presence of the rainbow, which are called
the spectral colors.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
It's right.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
On one end, you have the short wavelength, which is blue.
On the other end, you have the long wavelengths, which is.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Red technically violet.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
On the other side, well, red has a bunch of
different names. When you start reading in the color.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Well, no blue on the blue side, it's like starts
at violet. But we don't perceive it very well.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Oh well, I'm talking about what humans can see, right, Yeah,
and then everything else is in between.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Right, and what's really in the middle, Like yellow, Maybe
it seems like yellow is kind of in the middle.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah. When you think, you tell me.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Well, on the other end, beyond violet, you've got ultraviolet,
and beyond red, you've got infrared.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, these are things we can't see.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
No, we can't. Some animals can, remember they think monarch
butterflies are able to migrate all the way to Mexico
using ultraviolet detecting ultraviolet. I remember that.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Oh yeah, man, that was a good episode, pretty amazing.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
So this band of light, this visible spectrum, contains the
spectral colors which we perceive, right, And for a very
long time, everybody just thought, well, that apple's red or
that horse is blue. That's just how it's born. There's
nothing that can be done about it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
And then like we said, along came Newton, and Newton said, no,
something weird's going on here. Like you said, color doesn't
really exist. It's in the eye of the beholder almost literally. Yeah, right,
And the reason why an apple seems red or your
horse seems blue are because of natural chemicals found in
say the skin of the apple or the hide to
(06:00):
the horse. That are called pigments. So in an apple, specifically,
it's anthrocyanins that make it red. In the case of
a carrot, it's carotenoids, in the case of grass, it's chlorophyll.
And these pigments have the capability of absorbing some wavelengths
of light and reflecting others back. And the wavelength that
(06:22):
it reflects back are the colors that we perceive.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
And that's if it's an object that is opaque.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Well, yeah, that's a big one right there. Yeah, apples
are pretty opaque.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yeah, I would say, so that's your Superman maybe.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Yeah, heats invisible see through apples. Oh yeah he can.
Can I get your joke now? So yeah, with an
opaque object, where light doesn't pass all the way through,
some lights reflected back. So in the case of anthracyanins,
this pigment absorbs all the other wavelengths of light except red,
(07:01):
and it reflects red back, and so red is reflected back.
So what you see when you look at this apple
with all the red light reflecting back at you is
a red apple, that's right. That's how we perceive color
in the world around us. Naturally.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, and if it's transparent, it's not reflecting that light
but transmitting it. So it depends on the color of
light that's passing through it instead of reflecting back to you.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yes, and again it's that chemical makeup.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It operates in sort of the same way, right, It's
just not like in an apple skin, let's say.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Yeah, exactly. But it all comes to do It comes
down to basically pigments or whatever natural chemical or mineral
that either absorbs or reflects certain wavelengths of light.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
So here's the thing though, Chuck, Like that can happen
all day long, and as long as there's not a
human or a monkey, or a dolphin or a dog,
because dogs are not colorblind, that's right. They see and
colors than we do, but they're not color blind.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I always wonder how they do this tests animals.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
Yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I mean, I'm sure it's pretty easy to find out,
but I just didn't have time to look into it.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
I'm with you. Yeah, this is like in massive black
hole of information, Like you could just keep going and
going and going with colors such a huge expansive topic
that we could just do nothing, but color episodes for
the next several months. If we wanted to do you
want to kill me?
Speaker 1 (08:33):
I may not make it through today's.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
So you're doing great. This is fine, This is great, Chuck.
It is a very like big subject. Yes it is, man,
We're just we're providing a brief overview of it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
So, like I was saying, things can reflect color all
the time, but as long as there's not something there
to perceive it, is there any Is there really any
color there? Well that's a philosophical question, but there's an
answer to it, and the answer is no.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
If a tree falls in the woods and no one's
around to hear, it doesn't make a noise.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
No. Actually, my opinion on that one is yes, okay.
But with color, yeah, it doesn't exist without being perceived.
I think. Yeah, sound to me is different than.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
It's a bit of a brain melter. But I see
what you're saying.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Okay. So that leads you to the question of how
do we see color? And that wasn't figured out until
the eighteenth century, and it wasn't proven I think, until
the sixties. And there were a pair of guys who
were a dynamic duo. If I've ever heard of one before,
and what were their names?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Well, Thomas Young, he was I thought he was kind
of the main guy. I had never heard of.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
The other guy, Hermann von Helmholtz.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, Thomas Young. What I read was that he was
the first to propose the trichromatic theory. Basically that we
see everything through red, green, and blue channels because that's
how our eyes pick up on color.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Yeah, because we have specialized cells in our eyes called cones, right, Yeah,
I think we have something like one hundred million or
some ridiculous amount of rods. And rods are the things
that we see in like fine detail, black and white typically, right. Yeah,
Cones are color perceiving cells, and each cell is specialized
(10:18):
to you either attuned to wavelengths that red, green, or blue.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, you have way more rods than cones, about one
hundred and twenty million rods in each eye and only
only about six million cones in each eye.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
And those cones are concentrated mostly in the front of
your retina, Yeah, in the middle, right, which is why
you don't see color peripherally quite as well.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
So these cells are attuned to different wavelengths, right. The
long wavelengths are red, medium is green, and short is blue.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I thought you said medium was yellow.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
No, that's in the middle.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Oh okay, right, so medium is not in the middle.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
Well as far as our RGB goes, gotcha, okay. And
so with these cells, Chuck, if you're looking at your
blue horse, what was his name, Calvin the blue horse. Yeah,
so if you're looking at Calvin the blue horse, you're
getting a lot of information on from short wavelength light, yes,
(11:19):
not so much at the long or medium wavelengths, right,
And so there's probably a little bit it's not a
true blue horse, right, which would mean that it was
a totally saturated blue, which is only that blue wavelength,
true blue wavelength coming to your eyes, there's probably a
little bit of green, a little bit of red. And
(11:40):
so all the cones in your eyes are getting all
this information at once, and they're reporting to your brain
via electrical impulses about the quality of the wavelengths of
light that they're getting, and so your brain takes it
and basically it becomes a color mixer and creates the
color blue that you're seeing Calvin as Yeah, that's how
(12:02):
we detect color. And from the r and the G
and the B you can put together. Supposedly, the Commission
on Illumination, a European Commission on illumination back in nineteen
thirty one determine that humans can see something like two
point three eight million colors.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Oh, i'ds up to one hundred million, now.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
Is it? Because I've seen all over the place in
this The nineteen thirty one CIE findings are the ones
that people say, this has the best science behind it.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Oh really, yeah? Yeah, so one hundred million, no, I'm sorry,
ten million.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Okay, okay. The other thing about the CIE is that
people say, well, this was only under certain types of illumination.
I think three different types of illumination, so it is
entirely possible if you change the intensity or whatever, you're
going to have brand new color. So ten millions reasonable, Okay.
That's a lot of colors that we can see, all
from the red, the green, and the blue cones coming
(12:59):
together and your brain adjusting them and seeing, oh, well
that's burnt sienna.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
I know you're gonna say that, did you. Yeah, that's
sort of the go to joke color, right it is.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
It's pretty joky color.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
It's a good one. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Ten million colors,
or let's say it's two million, if you're going by
the nineteen thirty one model.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah, you know, the CIE naming convention.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Shall we talk about some of the characteristics of color.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
Yeah, but let's take a break first. This is getting heavy,
all right, okay.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
Saish all right.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
So if you actually you can do this on your
modern television as well, But it seemed like most TV's
now kind of come fairly set up.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Yeah, but in the old days, when you had those.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Little wheels to try and get that color right, it
was you know, you might have noticed things that said
hue and intensity or value or tone and all that stuff.
Those are all color characteristics. Yeah, and Hugh specifically is
I mean, that's basically what the color is. It's not
(14:18):
the lightness or the darkness. It's you know, it's the
greenness or the redness or the blueness, right, that's the hue.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
Yeah, it's it's what you can interchange that word with color.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, exactly. I like how they refer to it as
the identity of a color.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Yeah, that sounds kind of personal.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
The intensity is how pure it is. So, like we said,
most colors are mixes. You know, they bleed one way
or the other on the wavelength, but in its purest
form a single wavelength, which is really rare, that would
be the purity or the intensity.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Of the color.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
You're not gonna see that very.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
Often though, No, And I was wondering, like, that's pretty cool.
There's some physics labs some where that can produce pure
saturated green like unadultterated green or unadultraated blue.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
There is, or you're saying, I'm sure it's got to be.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
There has to be. Yeah, probably that has got to
be really something to see. To know, you're looking at green,
like nothing but green. I would like to see that sometime.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, and I have I'm not color blind, but I
have a more difficult time picking out other hues in
a color, whereas Emily's really good, like when picking out
paint colors, like that gray has this and this and
this in it, and I'm like, really like I see gray.
Speaker 4 (15:37):
Well, supposedly a lot of people have a color deficiency.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I might have a slight color deficiency.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
And a lot of people don't realize it. Well, yeah,
a lot of people don't realize that. They think that
this just this color just looks like this and thinks
everybody sees it that way and that's not the case.
And then it comes from a conversation where they're like, well,
wait a minute, what do you mean you see a
distinction between those?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Well, but yeah, but in my case, it's hues. It's
not like I see a completely different color, right, or you.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Know, black, or everything's just looks gray.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I did a brain stuff on color blindness. That's pretty interesting.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I went to research that one time for a show
and it would just like bent my mind so much
I quietly filed it away.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
So I'm sure you'll pick it next week.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Color blindness, Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and
that's basically has to do with light, the energy of
the light that makes it up.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Yeah, and the value is so hues. There's really just
kind of a finite, very finite number of colors of hues, right.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
And you think of like primary colors, which we'll talk
about soon. But when you adjust something, when you adjust
the value of it, yeah, that just creates a whole
new range of colors. So if you add a little
black to a color, what you're doing is shading it.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
If you add white, you are creating a tint.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
And then if you add black and white a gray,
you're toning it.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, right, And I think people interchange those words without
understanding what they mean.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Yeah, but they are definite distinct things, and that we
should probably say. There's a lot of really neat sites
on the internet. Pantone is a really good one, yeah,
where you can go look at color wheels and things
like that and see the distinction between these things and
be like, oh, you mean pastels. That's another word for
a tone.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, And it's a lot of people really get into
it because it's the basis of printing and art and photography,
and like every every sort of art form, well not
every art form, but many art forms boil down the color.
So if you go to art school, you're going to
study color pretty deeply, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
Yeah, And one of the things you're going to study
is color theory. And color theory is based done the
idea that certain colors contrast one another, certain colors complement
one another, certain colors should never be used together. And
not that it's just you know, your instructor serge saying no,
(18:16):
these colors don't go together. It's not just Serge's opinion, right,
These are objective facts as far as color theory goes. Sure,
And it's all based on the idea that all colors
fall into one of two categories. You have additive colors
and subtractive colors.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, and there's a couple of I mean, there's two
distinct applications for both of these. If you're talking about
a computer screen or a television that's using light, so
it's additive. If you're talking about paint or photography that's subtractive.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Right, So you can think of it this way. With
additive colors, you're starting with black and you're adding light
to it, and ultimately, when you add all these additive
colors together, you're going to have white. With subtractive colors,
you start with white, and when you add all these
colors together, you're ultimately gonna have black. And they subtract
by absorbing one another's colors.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Another color mind bender two because with subtractive color, you're
still adding colors, but it's not additive, right, But they're
sort of have to wrap your head around that.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Yeah, but they're subtracting wavelengths by combining colors and absorbing.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Them, right, Yeah, it takes a hue out.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
So a really good example of subtractive colors is if
you take cyan. Cyan absorbs orange, red, right right, So
if you take cyan and you mix it with yellow,
you produce green. And the reason that cyan and yellow
produce green is because the cyan absorbs the red light
(19:51):
and the yellow light. The yellow absorbs blue violet, and
so the only color that's not subtracted or absorbed is green.
So green is produced from these other pigments absorbing all
the other wavelengths. Yeah, and with it additive coloring, additive pigments.
It's it's quite the opposite. You have light combining to
(20:15):
form new colors. Rather than absorbing, you're adding to it.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, And like the apple is an example, like we
said earlier, of a subtractive color system. And again, like
a TV screen would be additive.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Yeah, I think we got that. Yeah, I mean it
is mine bending a little.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Bit some of the stuff, you know, I have to
read like ten times and then it sinks in.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
But the reason that all colors can be turned into
either additive primaries or subtractive primaries is that these are
the six colors of these, they're the six spectral colors.
They're the rainbow colors. Right. So additive primaries are what red, green,
and blue.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
RGB.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Yeah, and then the subtractive colors are cyan, yellow and magenta.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, I was gonna say magenta.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
They're almost like bizarro colors. They're the bizarro world primary colors.
When you think of primary colors, you think of like
the the what red, yellow, and blue is what most
people think of.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeah, Red, yellow, and blue were the traditional primaries, and
they still are, but when it comes to like painting
and printing, they've been replaced with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
Right, cmyk.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah, when you go to your clubhouse printer, Yeah, that's
what you're gonna be.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Seeing, cmyk. Or you can select RGB as well, red, green,
and blue.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
So Crosby Stills Nash and Young, right, right, or Crosby
Stills in Nash.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Okay, that's the difference.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
That's a good rule of thumb.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Man.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
All right, So we mentioned primary colors just a second go,
and then we have our secondary colors green, orange, and
purple hues, which you get from mixing the primary colors, right,
and then you have something called tertiary colors, which is
just furthering the color hues by mixing primary colors with
secondary colors.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Right, So the six tertiary colors and the two sets
of primary colors or the six secondary colors I think,
and the two sets of primary colors form the color
wheelers twelve colors in the color wheel.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, and tertiary colors are the ones that you'll hear
like blue green or red violet. Yeah, it's like literally
named the two colors.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
And color naming is another rabbit hole that you can
go down. There's a sight. Man, I wish I'd written
it down, but it's if you type in like who
names colors or color naming or something like that in Google.
Like one of the first page entries is the site
that you go through and it shows you different colors
(23:01):
and you write what you would name that color? Oh, interesting,
butter yellow or something like that, right, and the whole
well that was as as far as I got. I'm like,
well I would call this butter yellow, and you got
hungary had other things to do. But you can go
through in this. I think it's like ten or twenty
different shades that they show you colors that they show you,
And the whole purpose of all this is to find
(23:26):
some sort of commonality to create universal, universal naming convention
for colors. Yeah, it makes sense because you know, there
is a lot of distinction among languages for naming colors.
But at least one study that I found decided that
all colors universally for societies that do recognize individual colors,
(23:51):
rather than these are just warm colors and these are
cool colors. Yeah, which is universal. The more primary the color,
the shorter and easier to remember the name of it is,
like across cultures. So not all cultures will call it blue,
But what a culture is going to have like another
like short monosyllabic name for that color, for the same
(24:14):
thing that we would call blue.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Oh that's pretty interesting, Yeah, just because it's easier to understand.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
It's just it's basic, like colors appear to be basic universally.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
All right, I think we should take another break and
maybe come back and talk a little bit about how
colors can compliment each other and live in harmony and
what that all means to us.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Okay, s.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
All right, we're back.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
We sure are.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
So we talked about the different primary color, secondary, and tertiary.
And there's also something called complementary colors, which are basically
contrasting colors that make a neutral color when put together, right,
and they are really far apart in hue, as far
apart as they can be. And there if you look
at the color wheel, they're on the complete opposite side
(25:18):
from one another, right, And when you place them next
to each other, then their hue is like, I guess.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
It's just more robust looking, yes, because they complement.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
One another, right, Yeah, complimentary doesn't necessarily mean like, oh,
they look great together under all circumstances. So some complementary colors,
like red and green, if you play them next to
each other in the same intensity and the same size,
it's another one. Yeah, you are going to have what's
(25:50):
called an iceore. I have a shirt like that. It's
just too much equal amounts of bright red and bright green.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Trying to think of that shirt.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
It's just a Christmas shirt?
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Is it retired?
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well for the holiday.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Yeah, it's a holiday. Sure, Okay, But the whole point
of having colors and using colors together isn't just like, well,
these two are opposite the color wheels, So I'm going
to use them and equal amounts and equal intensity and
everything will be great. You have to achieve what's called
color harmony, and in doing that, you want to choose
different different shades or different tones or different tints, and
(26:26):
also different amounts at once. So like you're going to
use a bunch of red and a little bit of
green as an accent. That would be much more harmonious
than equal amounts of intense red and green next to
each other.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Yeah, and again this is when we say it's not
a matter of taste. That's like picking something out as
a matter of taste. But again, these are like scientific rules.
You can't just throw two colors together and say that
looks great or that they're harmonious.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
I mean, I guess you could, but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
You would surge would be like you're wrong. This is
objective stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And then with complimentary colors.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Getting back to that, there's this really cool thing that
they bring up called retinal fatigue. So you can do
a little experiment at home that's kind of blows your mind,
but it really illustrates how color works pretty well. If
you look at a bright red spot for about a minute,
your retinas are going to soak in all that red,
all those cones are and then when you go immediately
(27:22):
and look at a white surface, you're going to see
green briefly, right, not forever, right.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
And the reason why is because your red cells have
just been basically overstimulated and they're going to respond weakly
to the information that they're getting from that white right, Yeah,
And your blue and green cells are going to be
functioning just fine, so they're going to easily overwhelm your
red cells. And so what you'll see is this ghost
image of like a cyan square.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah, which is why. And the reason why is because
red is the complement of green. It'll always be that opposite, right.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
It doesn't just like randomly pick out a color.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
I know. And if you start adding all this stuff
together that there are objectively complementary colors that you see
when you see too much of the opposite one, doesn't
it all seem to fit so cleanly together that you're
almost like what is going on here?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Like?
Speaker 4 (28:18):
What is color? Why do we see color?
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (28:22):
It's a really good question, and evolutionary biologists have not
been able to explain it fully.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, I guess I really never thought about that because
there's well, I mean there's probably some evolutionary benefit, right, sure,
Like green things are generally good to eat.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
Yeah, but green is also the kind of a universal
color for disgust or sickness or illness.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Oh like you're green because you're.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
Green around the gills or something like that.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
Green is often like the color of rot grass. But
it's true. I mean, it's both. So how do we
evolve to understand the nuanced and I mean clearly if
we didn't evolve too sea in color so that we
could do this we have as a byproduct of it,
but we can very easily tick off whether something is
(29:10):
healthy for us dangerous. We get a lot of information
about an object in our environments quality and desirability based
on its color. It's almost like a shorthand that our
brains pick up.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, And part of that is because we're conditioned after
years of using green for go and green for safe passage,
and like red or orange for hazard signs and stop signs.
So part of that's conditioning. But as far as like
going back many many years before we made stop signs,
I have no idea.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
Yeah, you know, it really makes you wonder and even
like the idea that pink is for girls in blue
is for boys, that's a fairly recent development. Prior to
I think the early twentieth century, it was the opposite.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Did we ever do that as a show or didn't
know it's too short? I think we did, like a
video one or something, didn't we Maybe I seem to remember.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
That, But it was the opposite until like the nineteen
hundred's interesting, Yeah, yeah, that's interesting totally.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Is that's why you rock your pink shirts?
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Well, yeah, right, that's exactly why.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
That in fashion.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So getting back to harmonious colors if they are side
by I mean this is if you're like picking out
colors in your house or whatever, if you're not very
good at it, there are a few hard and fast
rules colors that are and get your little color wheel
out is really handy. If they're side by side, they're
going to harmonize well. And like we mentioned, colors directly
(30:39):
across from one another, complimentary ones also go well in
the right proportions because, like you said, the size of
it makes a big difference. They point out in the article.
I don't know if you've ever seen someone who's like
painted their room red, like in college. You know, some
stupid room mate would do that. It's an assault on
your senses because you're not used to seeing that much red, right,
(31:00):
But maybe an accent wall and a shade of red
matched with a complementary color. You wouldn't want to red
in green rim though, I guess green is complimentated or red.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
No, but you could conceivably say, use the complementary color
for like the trim or something like that.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, exactly, And then tints and shades and tones of
the same.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Color are always okay together.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
It's never gonna clash, but you're just gonna have to
mess around with like how much of one compared to
the other and what pleases your eye?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Right, Yes, so there is. You can't clash though.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
No, And so again Surge is saying, like, no, there's
objective truth as to complementary colors and harmonious colors, but
there is also personal preference. Oh sure, And this is
kind of like the thorn in the side of the
whole idea of color psychology that people use colors to
(31:58):
manipulate other people into like buy a product or whatever.
Study after study keeps finding that color preferencing color symbolism, Yeah,
is extremely personal. It's based on past experience, on your upbringing,
on your culture. Like for example, here in the West,
we wear black for mourning.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Well in the East, white is the color for morning.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Right.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
So there's a lot of culturally bound ideas about color too,
which keeps it from being like universally symbolic or whatever.
But that being said, there are some that just from
being exposed to it time and time again, like a
red stoplight that you come to identify symbolically with other stuff.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Yeah, And colors will also affect everyone differently mood wise,
but there are some generalities there too, Like blue is
generally a soothing color that will calm you down. Too
much though could actually have the opposite effect, like too
much blue.
Speaker 4 (32:59):
On some or it can really depress you.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
What blue can Yeah? I wonder if that's why they
say you're blue?
Speaker 4 (33:07):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean think about we describe our world
like that green with envy. Blue means you're down in
the dumps.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Red means you're angry, yeah, red faced, yeah, or red
neck light.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
That's different, it's a little different.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Warm colors, reds and yellows can also lift the spirits
if you're less excitable. And they say that most people
want to just strike a balance though, between the cool
and the warm.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Right, and that's when it comes to like personal preference. Yeah,
but the idea behind this is that a lot of
people don't realize this is going on, that they're being
affected by color, even though they are. That it's on
a very unconscious level.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah, And it also depends a lot on light, like
how much light a room has coming into it, because
you're gonna because sunlight is different than artificial light, your
shirt's going to look a different color outside in the
sun as it might.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
And I remember when we did the TV show there
was a lot of.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
With colors and stuff, you know, things would look different
outside than they would under studio lights.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
What's neat though, is we humans have developed this trick
called color constancy, where if you look at something, even
if it's in the shadow or in the sunlight, it
should conceivably look like different colored things because of the illumination.
But to us, we're still like, no, that's still green,
just because there's you know, shadow blocking it. Now, I
(34:31):
still see it as green. It doesn't make any sense,
and it's kind of perplexed I guess biologists for a
while trying to figure out what this is yor neurologists,
and they figured out that, yes, it is in the brain.
And there was this one guy who had some sort
of brain damage, I think from an electric shock, and
(34:51):
he also went for all intentsive purposes blind, but he
could still see color. What but he didn't have color constancy.
So they figured out that this guy was detecting wavelengths
of light color even though he couldn't see anything. He
could see colors still, but color constancy wasn't there. So
they figured out, well, that means that it's a trick
of the brain. Huh, very neat.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
It's very cool.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
They also bring up in the in the House off
Works article something I think is pretty interesting, how certain,
because of conditioning, certain colors can just appear to be wrong.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Like if you were to pull up and see a
green stop sign, it would freak you out.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Or the example they used to hear is if you
cracked an egg and there was a green egg yolk,
that would be really freaky too, because you're just so
used to that yellow, right, you know.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
You'd think, well, this is diseased or something.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, or doctor seust right, you know what else you got?
Did you look at that thing on pigment?
Speaker 4 (35:49):
I did. There's some wacky ways people have made pigments.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, I mean pigment as far as making paint in things.
Now they're synthetic, you know, like their synthesizing laboratories, which
makes sense. But throughout all of history, up until they
started doing that, they were actual real things in the
ground and on the earth that they would grind up
into powder. In the case of blue, there was a
(36:17):
semi precious stone called er there still is called Lapis
lazuli that was found all over the place in Afghanistan,
and that's how they made blue.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Or Azureite is a blue mineral of copper.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
So all of them, most of them have a few
different ways they could make it red. I think we've
talked about cinnabar before. The mineral is where you get
vermilion red and carmine. Carmine is bright red and that
comes from aluminum salt of carminic acid. So it's just
crazy that they found all these things in the world
(36:53):
to make. And I know blue is the toughest one
because you don't see blue very much in nature. I
think blue is the one you will see least in
the primary colors as far as nature goes, like some insects,
but like there's no blue food.
Speaker 4 (37:08):
Yeah, that's true. Blue horses, No, Well what about mine?
My favorite was India yellow, where they would feed cows
nothing but mango leaves and then collect their urine and
then boil it down, then filter out the concentrated muck
and then make balls out of it. And there was
(37:30):
the basis of your pigment.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
So those are just a few if you really get
into pigments, and you can like go crazy trying to
figure out where they all came from.
Speaker 4 (37:41):
Definitely, And I mean again, this is like really just
the surface of color. There's so much to it, and
I strongly advise you to go out and learn more
about it. Color it's everywhere.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Oh, how about the one last factoid? Why is the
sky blue?
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Oh it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Sky's not really blue.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
No, it shouldn't really have any color. Yeah, but the
angle of the sun coming down on the upper atmosphere
encounters things like water, vapor, and other tiny particles, and
they tend to scatter blue wavelength light more than the
other colors.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Right, that's it.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
So that's just bouncing around at all points, which is
why the sky is blue. It's say, like noontime. But
while the sky's blue at noontime over here, it's say
sunrise or sunset to the east or the west.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:28):
And since all that blue light is getting scattered over
you where it's noontime in the east of the west,
those reds and yellows and pinks are making it all
the way there, and the blue is not, which is
why sunrise and sunset it tends to appear reddish, whereas
like midday appears blue.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah, which is It makes total sense. And when your
kids ask you why is the sky blue, you can
tell them you.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Can tell them like the real reason you can.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
Be like color does not actually exist. Yeah, it's all lie.
Good luck with that and go to sleep. If you
want to know more about color, just type that word
in your favorite search engine or how stuff works dot common.
It will take you on a wild ride. And since
I said wild ride, it's time for listener mail. Uh.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
I'm going to call this something I've never heard of before,
precocious puberty.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Uh you ever heard of that?
Speaker 4 (39:21):
Yes, we talked about it did it early puberty?
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Okay, did we talk about that?
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Yeah, we said it.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
I guess this is in girls, so maybe that's why
it got you.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Surprise me.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
I'm a long time listener, and thanks for helping me
in my commute every day. Really enjoyed and giggled my
way through the episode of male puberty. Thanks so much
for mentioning precocious puberty.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Well, there you have it.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
I was diagnosed at age two after my mom came
to wake me before.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
School one day before I had a full beard.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Now before preschool. This is a lady and she had
started her period at two years old. Wow, And as
you can imagine, my mom was terrified. It took a
long time to get a correct diagnosis since it is
pretty rare. My treatment started out as daily shots that
my mom gave me at home that then went to weekly, monthly,
and annually as a year's progress.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
I also had intermittence days in the hospital for testing.
Speaker 4 (40:14):
Ah, that poor kid.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I know.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Treatment was stopped when I reached twelve years old, essentially
pressing play and my puberty that had been on pause
for almost ten years.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
See that's cool treatment.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that they figured out how
to stall puberty.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
Yeah, they're like stay stay Okay.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
God.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I have only hazy memories of this, of course, as
I was a child, but I do remember that missing
shots caused quite a bit of pain since my.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Body was growing out of control.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Essentially, I've never been able to find out what the
long term effects might be, but I've had a pretty
decent health into my adult life and I'm now thirty
one years old. Awesome, So thanks a lot.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
And that is from Lauren in California.
Speaker 4 (40:54):
Well, thanks a lot, Lauren. Appreciate that we love hearing
from people with real life experiences of stuff where you
just talk about that's right.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
You know.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
If you want to let us know about your real
life experience, we want to hear it. You can tweet
to us at s y SK podcast. You can join
us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
(41:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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