Do we all see colours the same?

Question

when we see a colour we are told the name of it eg blue, but how do we know if everyone sees it the same because we'd all still call it blue, and how is it possible to find that out?

Answer 1

We don't and we really can't' find out.

What you see as "blue" has always been blue your entire life. What my eyes see may be red, with whispy orange clouds. But that sky has always been called "blue" since I learned my colors, and the clouds have always been described as white.

It really does not matter, because real perceptions, and naming occurs in our brains. Even you don't really "see" the blue sky. Your eyes carry the image to the back of the eyeball, the photo receptors (rods and cones) turn the image into a neural signal, carried by the optic nerve, to the brain. By this point, it is no longer an image, at all. The brain then takes the neural signal and processes it into something it (meaning "you") understands.

What makes sense to your brain is "blue" skies and "white" clouds. Mine may be red, but my brain has labeled it "blue."

All of our perceptions of the world work this way. A person touches my arm, I don't really feel that person's skin on mine. I "feel" this process that eventually, I know as a "touch."

This breakdown of our perception has lead to a great philisophical question and centuries of discussion. "I know I exist. How do I know YOU exist?" Not a single one of us can answer the last part. We can only know the first.

The philosopher and author, Jean Paul Sartre wrote, "Cogito, ergo, sum." This is Latin for, "I think, therfore, I am."

Answer 2

I've always wondered the same thing, and I have been told that it's simply not possible to know. We do know that we assign the same relationships among colors, such as contrast and blending (i.e., blue plus yellow makes green). We also know that a given color has the same wavelength no matter who sees it, and we do know that there is some built in variability just based on how many cones (color photoreceptors) are in each person's eye, but there's just no way to know if each individual color (red, blue, green, etc.) really and truly looks the same to different people.

Answer 3

A question I have asked before, you don't know and there isn't really away to find out that I can think of.
Only real proof there is that we do see the same colour is when you have a greeny-blue kind of colour, if you know it as something else you may have a problem.

Answer 4

we'll never know

we're all taught to name the same thing by the same colour name, but that does not prove at all that we all see it the same.

to be sure we'd need to be able to tap the signals between the eye and the brain, and we don't have the technology to do that for the time being, especially if it is to be assumed that the test subject will still be intact and sighted afterwards.

Answer 5

people's colour perception can change, in exteme cases there is colour blindness or certain spectrums such as red/blue colour blind. outside that there is some evidence of differences but whether it is the eye's fault or the brain's for associating different shades. For example on a colour chart pointing to a dark blue and saying it's purple one person might not agree and they need more or less red in the colour for them to class it as purple.

Also there is cultural upbringing. Japanese people for example beleive that green is a shade of blue. In which case when learning japanese you have to remember to translate a traffic light go sign as "blue" although the shade is no different in Japan as America. There is no correct way and as long as the colour has blue in it it is perfectly reasonable to think it a shade rather than a seperate colour.

Answer 6

I have long asked myself this same question. Same goes for taste - I mean how could anyone not love all my favorite foods if they tasted the same thing I did? I don't think it is possible to find out - though there was a way to determine color blindness in people - maybe the answer lies in there, although as I understand color blindness, all colors look gray (particularly red and green) and so it would be able to be determined when someone thinks red, blue and green are all the same color, right? Good question!

Peace!

Answer 7

I would imagine that if we all see colour, then we all see that colour the way it was descibed to us as a child. I think of blue in the sense of the sky, but if you live near a beach you may see it as the colour of the ocean, I suppose that's why they have paint named 'sky blue' and so on....this says conformity to me! THEY(whomever THEY may be)want us all think alike and this a way in which THEY can do that!

Answer 8

According to an article I read in Nature magazine, there is a wide variation among people in the number of the 3 color receptors. I would think that this might imply variations in the sensitivity to certain colors as well. We could test this by testing peoples sensitivity to shades of colors?

Answer 9

No, we do not. As we grow older we see colours differently too...check out paintings of the same scene by Gaugin (I think, or it might have been Monet)....over a very long period of time he used different colours for the same objects.

Answer 10

You can be tested for colour deficiency and colour blindness.

256 million colours have been given sounds, if you have the right equiment, then sounds play to tell you what colour you are looking at.