So, I came across this quote on NASA's website the other day:
"Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not "you". The atoms in your body are 99.9999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don't just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum." - Sergio Toporek
After reading this, I eventually ended up listening to a Radiolab podcast all about colors. The question being asked was, "To what extent is color a physical thing in the physical world, and to what extent is it created in our minds?" The podcast was a little over an hour long, so it went through a lot of different questions, theories, and just facts about color in general. It was interesting to hear about how dogs view the rainbow since they lack the red photoreceptor, and how in contrast, the mantis shrimp sees so much more colors we can't even begin to imagine with their 16 photoreceptors.
Following this, they discussed how it is possible to give someone who is colorblind their lacking photoreceptor by 'wrapping' it in a virus and injecting it. They discovered this by giving monkeys who lacked the red photoreceptor this injection. After a few weeks had passed, the monkeys began to recognize red.
The thing I found really interesting is that they found that most all ancient texts had absolutely no mention of the color blue. For example, the way Homer talks about color in the Iliad and Odyssey: "...wine dark sea." Homer also uses the colors black and white much more often than anything else, followed by red, and even less yellow and green. Not only did they find that ancient Greek texts had no mention of blue, but also ancient texts from around the world. Even the original Hebrew bible doesn't mention blue.
So this raised the question, "When did blue come into language?" They pointed out that blue is apparently extremely rare in nature. The blue sky contradicts this, yet they found that if a person is not told the sky is blue, it is very unlikely they will describe it as blue, even if they can point out other blue objects. They theorized that one would not need a world for a color unless one has created a category in their mind for a certain color - enabling them to, for example, identify a blue square amongst green squares.
I personally found all of this very intriguing, especially being an artist and dealing regularly with different types of colors. The podcast is definitely worth the listen. It was really difficult to sum up everything they talked about and the detail they included, so here's the link!
http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/
