Posts

Showing posts from July, 2017

The Colour of Red

Image
[side note: if you are looking for the app, it is available here on the play store .] What does red look like? Maybe a flag, or an apple, or blood, but these are all relative terms. It's a notoriously tricky problem to figure out how to explain what it's like to see red to someone who's never seen it - maybe it's not possible? Even stranger is the common realization that maybe it's arbitrary...could it be that other people experience colours completely differently to how you do? Perhaps to them, red feels like green does to you, and vice-versa. They'd still call all the items above 'red', but they'd experience them in the same way you do green. What's more, if this were possible, perhaps you'd never know... It's known as the Inverted Spectrum problem, and it's a tricky one: it's very easy to assume everyone experiences things the same as you. Some people can go a long time before realizing they're colour-blind, where