How Many Colors Can We See?

Quick Questions cracks the code of color vision, color blindness, and even newly discovered sort of technicolor vision!
----------

----------
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?

Sources:

[chaosPneumatic]

1:53 so it IS possible to come up with a new color! That's usually considered the limit of human imagination. I'd love to know more about tetrochramats and what these new colors are that they perceive.

[rraacchh]

My uncle is colour-blind. I found out when we were eating dinner once and he asked me to pass him the blue mustard bottle. It's interesting because he's an artist and his paintings are great, but I've noticed he never really paints with bright colours. The funny thing is, he didnt even know he was colour-blind until after he married my aunt and he accidentally painted a portrait of her where she had green skin. He's been much more careful to check the labels on his paint since then.

[cestlavi.]

I really appreciate that you used the terms "biological males" and "biological females."

[WilliamJakespeareProps]

A friend of mine can't distinguish between green and brown. Forests really suck for him. 

[BecauseWeCanTheChannel]

There's a 50 Shades of Grey joke in here somewhere...

[danielhale]

I watched a 6 lecture Great Courses series on color, and it implied that it's quite possible that classic-era Greeks and others around that time period couldn't perceive blue very well (the ocean is always gray, they don't talk about blue). They also pointed to more modern cultures that can distinguish various shades of blue-green with tremendous precision, but think pink and red are basically the same thing (pink doesn't look distinct to them). The idea is that culture and exposure greatly influence how you perceive colors, literally affecting how well you see and distinguish them, not just how you feel about them.

[drpepper]

Does anyone else want to see one of these scishows as a joke episode where the title is a normal question but the answer takes like 5 seconds? Ex. How many colors can we see? A: 6, 864, 820, 215, 044 colors *end video*

[Ravenclaw]

Michael's voice is very soothing to listen to. 

[minarikp]

Another good question would be: *how many different colors can you see at the same time?* When two colors are placed next to one another, can you tell the different? How many of them would you recognize? (E.g.: can U see the difference between Color(FF, FF, 00, 00) and Color(FF, FE, 00, 00) /Color(aplha, reg, green, blue)/) Would you still see the difference if they weren't shown next to each other, but a gap between or first one, then the other.

[SurvivorMurk]

Whenever you hear "color blindness", the usual thought is someone cant see any colors, that their world is gray like a 1930's movie. That's what i thought it meant untill recently. It generally means "cant see a specific color & it's hues", like he said above.

We've been taught that apples are red & bananas are yellow, right? What if that's what it's like to me, but viewing the fruit from your eyes, the apple is blue & the banana is pink to me? You wouldnt know that, because youve been taught that this the name for this color. For all i know, my red apple could be blue or purple to you but we wont ever know that because that's the name we've given that color!.... or untill science develops a way for us to see through each other's eyes. That'd be fucking cool. science, get on that plz.

[AllonsyArielle]

I'm currently taking a class on Color Vision so this video was a nice little summary of the basics.  It's always fun when these videos correlate with school!

[storyspren]

Wait. Some people see colors I don't? That means there are some people who can literally see something I can't even fathom. Damn...

[marcyanderson]

I lost a sister to Trisomy 13 ten years ago today. I was wondering if scishow could do a video on genetic disorders such as Trisomy 13, 18, 21 (down syndrom), or any other number of disorders. That would be super cool and mean a lot to me. You guys are awesome, you really do help broaden my understanding of the world.

[preachingamigo]

How do I know that you and me see the same colours the same way when you and me see. Is my red blue for you, or my green your green too? Could it be true we see differing hues? And say we do- then how would we discover this fact? And even if we did, would there even be any impact?

[elizabethcoopersoutham]

super ! thanks, your show has given many young people all over the world the inspiration and awe science brings to our lives.

[Turtleman]

QQ: why do we need that carpet thing underneath our computer mice?

[puncheex]

The cones types are usually called red, green and blue for convenience, but in actuality the colors received by the respective cones peak in the yellow-green, green and violet colors.  Thus red for us is a color which tweaks the yellow-green receptors exclusively, returning nothing in the green and violet cones. Yellow is the color which the yellow-green returns best, but in which there is also some of the green response.  It is the brain which is analyzing the three color responses and telling us "red".  For tetrachromats, the question becomes, how is the brain wired to see the extra color data that is available? Does it ignore it, as evolution has programmed it for only three colors, or can it use it?

See wikipedia, "Color".

[MWTravesty]

How many colors can we see?

All of them.

[AlmightyThor]

Oh look at that, they halved the audio in the end credits rather than doubling it as it is in most other scishow videos.

[Argacyan]

1:10 I can see a roman 5 attached to a W in the middle, so that the top of the 5 and the W form a line.

the W and the 5 are green and the whole rest of the circle is red.

the green reminds me of a lanw while the red looks like blood -dead as well as alive blood-cells / dark red and (almost) bright red with minor variations in between--...