
How we gave colors names and it messed with our brains (part II) - gruseom
http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/11/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-ii/
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tikhonj
I was actually talking with some friends about just this recently.

Particularly, I speak Russian as well as English. In Russian, we actually have
two separate words for blue: one for light blue and one for dark blue. They
are completely different colors. My idea was that this actually changes how
Russians view colors as compared to English speakers. Good to see my idea has
some scientific backing :).

I personally am in a particularly odd position: I learned Russian first but
still learned English at a very young age (5) and have since used it more. I'm
not entirely certain how this has affected my view of blue, but I think I see
it more like English speakers (e.g. not differentiating between the two blues
intuitively) than Russian speakers. This probably says something about my
relative comfort in the two languages.

Another interesting thing is that for the longest time I did not even realize
that the difference was so fundamental. I just took it in stride. When I
thought about it, it was a little weird: there is actually a different set of
_colors_ (rather than just shades of color) in the two languages. The fact
that I could go from one set to the other without noticing is rather
interesting as well.

~~~
Natsu
Japanese has something like that, too. See, Japanese didn't always make the
blue-green distinction[1]. Because of this, certain items get described as 青い
(aoi - green/blue) even though modern Japanese contains a word for green. So
both clear blue skies and green traffic lights are still called 青い.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ao_%28color%29>

~~~
tikhonj
The article states that most world languages do not actually make a
distinction between blue and green.

To me this seems completely foreign, which is an interesting insight on how
much I take my language for granted. I can't even imagine thinking of blue and
green as the same color, just like most Russians can't imagine thinking of
синий and голубой as the same color (blue).

While I was brought up in a Russian family (we still speak Russian at home), I
went to an English school from the first grade, so for me the difference
between синий and голубой is much less ingrained than the difference between
blue and green. I think this just shows that while Russian is my first
language, English has really become dominant, for better or for worse.

~~~
Natsu
There's an old study claiming there's actually some logic in how the
distinctions progress:

"According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their
Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange and
grey will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction
between green and blue. In their account of the development of color terms the
first terms to emerge are those for white/black (or light/dark), red and
green/yellow."

See also:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution)

------
twelvechairs
I have the feeling that most HN readers have their colour perceptions affected
far more by the limited spectrum of an RGB LCD than anything else.

For instance - I challenge anyone reading this to tell me what colours are not
represented well on their screen. The spectrum is wide and 3 channels is
really 'tolerable' rather than 'good' coverage. In reality there is a vast
range of violets, reds and green-yellow-orange in the world that are
represented as muddy-blurs of other colours rather than themselves on
screen...

Nobody seems to make the same fuss over quality of colour and the visual
spectrum on computers as say, audiophiles do about miniscule differences in
what they hear. I'm not quite sure why this is.

~~~
sillysaurus
This is true, but irrelevant. The human visual system adapts to reconstruct
what it believes a surface color is, based on the colors of the overall image.
Classic example:

[http://content.screencast.com/users/shawnpresser/folders/Jin...](http://content.screencast.com/users/shawnpresser/folders/Jing/media/f9798a32-dfba-4946-b45b-44795db321c1/2012-06-16_2140.png)

A and B are exactly the same RGB color, even though they appear completely
different.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Sen1HTu5o>

So in truth, yes, the LCD spectrum is limited, but you can still achieve an
overall "look and feel" regardless of the smaller gamut. Our perception of any
specific color is dominated by other colors around it in the scene.

~~~
twelvechairs
Thats a slightly separate point. Your mind sees colour in many different ways.
One of these (at a higher-level) is as shapes and relative-tones as you
describe. Other parts of the brain and the body work at a much lower-level
however, which is why (for instance) people innately enjoy natural-sunshine
and get depressed when sitting inside under lightbulbs
(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder> is one, well
researched side of this).

~~~
nopassrecover
That's _probably_ more Vitamin D differences than colour.

~~~
twelvechairs
Vitamin D basically IS presence of/lack of colour - because it is only
produced when certain wavelengths of light ('colours') are present. As well as
vitamin D there are also many other chemicals in the body which need certain
wavelengths of light to be produced. See for instance
web.mit.edu/dick/www/pdf/286.pdf (an 1980s but reasonable article not written
by quacks)

~~~
nopassrecover
That's an interesting thought and cheers for the link. I guess I tend to think
of colours as only within the visual spectrum, and my understanding was that
the chemical reactions were from UV and above, but I can see now that's kind
of arbitrary thinking.

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busted
The end of the embedded video, where it shows the experiment with the African
tribe and how they see colors differently, is totally amazing.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I&feature=player_detailpage#t=299s)

~~~
gurkendoktor
Beware, though, that the effect shown in the video is much stronger than the
one described in the article. Several of the comments suspect that the Himba
tribe actually has a genetic difference that causes the linguistic one and not
the other way around.

------
cup
This is interesting because in Arabic colours are presented very differently
than in English. I'm not sure about other languages but in Arabic colours are
a bit more "looser" for lack of a better term. There are more shades of red
for instance because Arabs were used to different shades of red in their
horses and deserts. The colours are less defined for instance "the colour
between red and brown" (as many horses are) or "the colour of ash" are used
instead of "the colour red / grey". Colours also have properties and traits
which define them (some colours are strong or thick and others are weak).

Perhaps any HN Arabic grammarians might be able to discuss this further.

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Dn_Ab
Perhaps I've been warped by machine learning but it seems obvious to me that
labeled color differences would be easier to distinguish. Since each time we
used the word we would be training our brain to discriminate between color
input patterns whose differences are not stark. Colors with no labels would
not get many opportunities to be learned, but for the called out colors, on
each use it would strengthen the connections between which ever set of
associated neurons.

Language is not the only thing to train this difference. Hobbies and jobs
should be able to as well. I suspect artists and photographers perceive subtle
color gradations better than non artists; audiophiles, dancers, and musicians
can pick out tempo and pitch much more readily, blind people can pick out echo
patterns, engineers perceive catastrophic corner cases where normal people see
an idea and a botanist sees a whole world where I just see grass and trees.

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vegas
The problem with building massive hypothesis on human cognition based on
findings like [http://www.empiricalzeal.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/06/reac...](http://www.empiricalzeal.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/06/reactiontimeleftrightvisualfield.png) is that there's
no mention of just how many folks actually participated in the study.

Much of 'evolutionary psychology' is based on really complicated mathematical
models fit to very small samples, or no sample at all, expanded upon by
lengthy blocks of meandering prose.

Just-so stories are a literary genre, not a science.

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keithpeter
"Having a word for blue seems to make the color ‘pop’ a little more in our
minds. "

A lot to digest in this article. The quote above reminded me of 'categorical
perception' of musical notes among musicians (without perfect pitch) and the
rest of us. Professional musicians seem to 'bin' frequencies near a tone
centre into notes with sharp divisions between them.

------
evincarofautumn
This is very interesting stuff. I’m a native English speaker but also grew up
learning French and other languages; to me, colour categories seem to be
pretty much an arbitrary matter of convenience. There is no _inherent_
distinction between light blue and dark blue in English, just as there is no
distinction between pure and impure code in C++. You can introduce it
artificially, it’s just that the language puts them in the same category.

Also, English may have only 11 “basic” colour categories, but there are
_loads_ more colour words than that, and you can get basically as specific as
you like.

I also have a suspicion that I’m a tetrachromat, because I distinguish various
red-orange colours that no one else seems to. Since I’m male, though, that
would only be possible if I had two X chromosomes _and_ the right mutations on
both sides of my family—possible, but unlikely.

------
roryokane
So if this is really true, I wonder how we _should_ name colors for maximum
usefulness? For instance, which set of names will help us tell colors apart
better, "red orange yellow green blue violet"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Color_star-en.svg>) from the RYB color
model, or "red yellow green cyan blue magenta" (the six labeled angles on
<http://www.had2know.com/images/hsv-color-model.png>) from the RGB model?

I suppose, for one thing, that it depends on whether we want to describe
colors we often see in life (lots of blue sky, not many purple things) or the
spectrum of colors evenly for looking at art.

~~~
gchpaco
As you might imagine, the print industry put in a lot of research over the
course of the 20th century to ensure that e.g. Coca-Cola's cans come out the
same color no matter which factory makes them. As such there are a number of
mathematical models, called absolute color spaces, that can be said to name
any given color within its gamut precisely. Adobe RGB and sRGB are two that
are RGB based.

A different way of doing it are systems like Pantone that has no particular
mathematical model; Pantone basically numbers swatches according to some
arcane formula and can work with you to precisely reproduce any color you
happen to want. If you want a color that isn't represented in their swatches
they'll just add another one to the end of the list and do something horribly
complex behind the scenes so they can tell you, or more likely your ink
vendor, what to look for and what an acceptable color match is. These swatches
are frequently named as well as numbered; somewhere on that list is Coca-Cola
red, and you don't get to use it. This leads into a bunch of very strange IP
law issues that I am not in any way able to talk about knowledgeably.

CIELAB and CIEXYZ are reference color spaces designed to encompass every color
an average human can see, and these can be used to define the above standards.
CIELAB is probably the best known of these. One of the odder things about
CIELAB is that there are colors in gamut for it that no human can see (for
example, a color that stimulates only the medium wavelength cone cells).

As a matter of professional practice people who care about this use Pantone
PMS references. Photographers, particularly digital ones, tend to just use
sRGB or Adobe RGB and look at you funny when you talk about Lab spaces. And
virtually no one else cares enough to distinguish between pinkish red and
reddish pink in a formal way.

~~~
henrikschroder
I used to work for Sun Microsystems a very long time ago, and I remember that
there was a Pantone colour called Sun Violet or something that was "the"
colour you should use in all logos.

------
rabbidroid
RadioLab had a show recently on this subject, it's really well put. a must
listen episode.

~~~
rhizome
This isn't the same thing. The Radiolab episode is about the physical
interface to color and the above article is about words changing the meaning
of color. Strangely, in none of the comments here or on the article does
anybody mention the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which covers the linguistic
aspects of this story. While there is some debate about the validity of
linguistic relativity in the general case, it's basically a "nope."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

~~~
gruseom
"or [i]n the article does anybody mention the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis"

The name "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" may not literally appear but the whole
article is obviously about it:

 _This question goes back to an idea by the American linguist Benjamin Whorf,
who suggested that our language determines how we perceive the world._

There have been other recent discoveries in favor of the hypothesis posted
here as well. I've felt for a long time that Sapir-Whorf will be
rehabilitated; it doesn't make sense that something so fundamental as language
wouldn't have cognitive effects.

~~~
rhizome
Well that's just my mistake, then. :/ Thanks for the backup, I didn't mean to
post half-cocked.

~~~
gruseom
No worries. I actually went and looked for the post I was thinking of that
last touched on this, and found that we'd both already commented in that
thread.

------
sharvey
This makes me that we really are but neural networks running on massive CPUs
called brain. We need training data to accomplish much of anything. And the
training data is the result of the analysis from previous generations,
especially our parents.

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bluesnowmonkey
The difficult one with the green squares challenges us to find the difference
between 4FBB0E and 5FC004. It's a pretty substantial change in the red value
(though totally invisible to me). They cover themselves in ochre, right? So
they're probably more sensitive to red.

Also, they screwed up producing the video. The first time they show the green
squares, the different one is in the top left. The second time, it's in the
top right.

------
LeafStorm
For those interested in learning more about the subject, I would recommend
_Through the Language Glass_ by Guy Deutscher. It deals heavily with the
relationship between language and color as part of exploring the overall
relationship between language and culture. (This particular experiment is one
of the topics he discusses.)

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Aloisius
I'm a bit confused by this article as it claims:

 _Koreans are familiar with the colors yeondu and chorok. An English speaker
would call them both green (yeondu perhaps being a more yellowish green). But
in Korean it’s not a matter of shade, they are both basic colors. There is no
word for green that includes both yeondu and chorok._

Wouldn't that be chartreuse?

~~~
Evbn
That's not a Korean word.

------
vitomd
Naming things changes our perception of the world. This is know from centuries
ago, zen master, buddist, they know this.

In the video, the Tribe need to see the difference between greens because they
must know the difference between a poison leaf and a one good. Each culture
evolves to name the important things to them

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zyb09
Wow, interesting. Hard evidence that language affects our low level perception
of the world. There was always speculation, that different languages
influences the way we "think", but I haven't seen such a black-and-white proof
yet.

~~~
Evbn
The effect is very well established in hearing, where we learn to hear
phonemes of our language and lose our ability to recognize phonemes not in our
native language.

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dgreensp
This is fascinating. By teaching our kids to use our culture's color words, we
are training them in a specific classification skill, so that when they see a
color, the name of its class comes to mind.

~~~
Evbn
Same thing with the sounds used in spoken language, which varies between
groups of people.

~~~
dgreensp
Good point, ability to distinguish certain vowel or consonant sounds is just
the same way.

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readme
I had no trouble distinguishing the second circle either, but I'm speculating
that's because I call one of those colors turquoise.

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f137
Well, I actually do not think that the tiles in the "circle of colored tiles"
are green. For me, they are as much blue as green.

