Colour's

[amabelspink]

How do you know that the colour I see is the same colour that someone else sees

[Ethel]

We don't. But it doesn't matter.

[WaldoMcFroog]

Ethel's answer is 100% correct!

If we both look at the same coloured tile and I see blue and you see red but we both understand that the name for the colour we're looking at is 'orange', it doesn't matter that we're percieving it differently.

However, I would imagine that its very likely that we do all see the same colours (those with colourblindness and similar conditions aside). We just can't prove it.

[wallis1007]

ask em !

[Ethel]

wallis - how on earth would they know?

You recognise a colour by its name - but you could see tomatoes as my idea of blue, and we wouldn't know. All we could agree is that we both know the colour to be red.

I have pondered over this before, and have never been able to think of a way of determining the fact of it.

[dilligaf]

Recently had a lens transplant in the right eye. Colours are now far brighter looking through the right eye than looking through the left one.

[Teddio]

The phenomenon of colour is perceived by the brain. The colour stimulus is learned and a name is attached to it. It is not possible to prove that one person's perception is the same as anothers. Some mathematical savants perceive numbers as colours and can perform complex calculations using this facility. Some people claim to dream in colour and yet there are no stimuli travelling along the optic nerves.

[wildwood]

Colours can be proven up to a point, with the usual testing cards for colour blindness - but this only certifies what the majority of people see. Very few people are totally colour blind but over 25% of western society has some level of CB, mostly males.

[mibn2cweus]

Colour is light of a specific wavelength or a mixture of proportions of two or more specific wavelengths of light. These wavelengths are typically regarded as those within the visible range of the spectrum while there are some colours (wavelengths of light) that are visible only to certain species.

The rainbow sorts out many of the visible wavelengths of light by the degree of their respective angles of refraction within a raindrop. Shorter (bluer) wavelengths are refracted (bend) more and so appear in a different band in the rainbow than their longer (redder) counterparts.

These different wavelengths of light (colours) are given names according to things that are widely associated with their appearence; (green grass, red rose, blue sky, orange orange), or colours may be assigned to standard wavelengths.

Colour perception begins in the eye where colour receptors have greater sensitivity to a specific range of wavelengths of light which are then processed interpreted and cataloged by the brain.

The point of all this is that we all perceive the same colours, the difference is in how these colours are sensed, processed and interpreted by a particular individual. Fortunately there is a significant ability to agree on the identification of various colours that makes them a valuable tool for communicating this aspect of what we see.