Do all humans see the same colours?

Question

Setting aside people who are colour-blind, do all humans see colours in the same way. If Person A was born and told the colour they were looking at was called 'green' and they saw what I think of as green, and person B was born and told that the same colour was called green but they saw it as being what I think of as blue, then no one would know. So it is possible that my mouse mat looks red to me and blue to you but we both know that the colour of my mouse mat is called red. This sounds much more complicated than it is.
Does anyone agree that this is plausible?

Answer 1

I completely agree with you - this question first occured to me years ago. I've noticed that colours look slightly different to one of my eyes than the other, so I thought that other people might be seeing, or perhaps a better word is experiencing, something different to me.
Although colour is representative of the frequency of the light coming from whatever we're looking at, I don't think there's any way to tell whether you and I are experiencing the same 'sense' of colour.

I think the same may be true of sound, too - after all, there are SOME people who think Robbie Williams can sing!

Answer 2

Hi there,
I have had the same question for years! It think it is possible that everyone sees colour slightly differently to each other...however after a long time of pondering this,... I think that physics makes everyone see the same way. Colour is really only different wavelengths of light.(and without light there are no colours)..for instance, red is a certain wavelength and green is another. I think that the way we interpret these wavelengths via the optics of our eye and our brain will be the same...or if there are differences between people they would only be marginal. The only difference may be how the brain interprets the information coming into the lens of the eye.

This is something that cannot be known for sure without being able to try a brain transplant!!!!

Good question!

Cheers,

Ron

Answer 3

Maybe. The thing is that most people see color but some can't see certain shade of the color. For example, I have a friend that can see all shade of green except for blue green, to him it looks the same as another green. Back to yours, it might have been plausible back in the day. But today, with advance communication and technology, I think everybody calls the same colors the same name.

Answer 4

I agree with you. But how will we ever know? We know the names for colours and how to recognise them, but there's no-way of knowing if we see them in the same way as everyone else. Same with faces, I think. We can recognise people we know, but are we seeing the same set of features another person is seeing? I have wondered about such things for many years. It is true for smell and taste, and perhaps also hearing; so why not sight too? Your theory could apply to a lot more than colours!

Answer 5

No, we don't, as I discovered when working in the stationery department of a famous London store. A lady came in looking for a diary and she was very insistent as to the colour. She wanted a green one. I showed her every one of that colour and she was dissatisfied until her eye fell on a blue one, which was what she was after. I continued to show her blue diaries, which she continued to refer to as green. I have always remembered that incident because not only was what I and most people saw as green blue to her, but that "blue" was a favourite colour and important to her.

Answer 6

I wondered this same challenge. 16 yrs previous. My idea is definite: the image voltaic receives meditated on each and every thing, exept for black. image voltaic includes all hues. Imagion you've an orange piece of paper. If the solar shines on it, it absorbs each and every of the image voltaic, exept for the orange elementary. This elementary get's stuck on your eye, so we see a similar elementary, so we see a similar color. To the individuals who do not realize the question: It has no longer some thing to do with colourblindness. you spot the grass eco-friendly. yet who says some different person doens't see it blue, and the sky eco-friendly. If human beings continually allow you to understand the grass is eco-friendly, even as you spot it blue, you'll call blue eco-friendly, so that you anticipate we see a similar hues. yet you don't understand. at a loss for words? you have to be..

Answer 7

Not really, we get told as kids that eg wavelenght X is Red.
Therefore everyone identifies Red as wavelength X.

The only way someone would see wavelength Y as eg Green and another person see wavelength Y as Blue
would be if they had been told different things.

Answer 8

I was thinking the same thing for quite a while.. But i ve heard about the stories of people losing their eye sight and getting it back from transplantations.. if different people see it in different color then the person who's eyes doesn't belong to his own must have seen the difference.. i ve never heard of any story saying the colors r different after the transplant. .. point.

Answer 9

No i don't think so all people see the color in the same way. For example, Nepalese people, see the white people as brown. And even white people are not white in colour.

Answer 10

Three of my brothers have variations of colorblindness. Two are shade blind and one is completely colorblind.

I am synesthetic...

My youngest son sees green as brown and brown as green... We are not yet sure if it is just a learning thing (he is very intelligent) or actually the way his brain processes color?