The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue Corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)
...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes.
Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..
I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
> Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.
But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific.
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.
The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.
Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is:
- I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there?
- If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.
"Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"
- Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.
Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.
You are confusing geographical position with countries.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy)
Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.
Interesting.
Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days
Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.
Practical ramifications:
* Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny
* Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.
That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.
Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.
I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.
I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.
This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.
This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.
I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.
The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.
Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.
EDIT:
in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue
The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
Many languages considered green and blue so closely related that they grouped them together under a single term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
grue
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
I have had similar conversations with my wife a few times, but I'm the one with working color vision.
I am bluer than 78%. Colors. How do they work.
It’s 01:30 in the night you cannot just drop lyrics like that, I’ll have the song stuck in my head for hours.. :(
For this, you just lost The Game.
Thanks for the earworm.
I'm bluer than 98% apparently. For me, turquoise is green. I didn't realize that's not normal.
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
blue than 90%, same verdict with turqouise, though what I call turquoise is bluer than what is shown
...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes. Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..
I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
You've got the blues.
Same situation happened to me, and I have same test result as you.
"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
> Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names
If a language/culture does not have a word for "blue" does that mean the colour does not exist?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
Also, a bit of fun with brown:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
This is the first time I realized that turquoise is the gray area.
Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.
But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific.
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.
The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.
Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
The term you're looking for is "qualia" - one's own experience of sensory inputs, which cannot be compared with others' except through allegory.
We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
It would be interesting to see if llms all share the same internal representation of red. It might hint towards how it works for humans.
Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
If you want to explore it further, look up the philosophical aspects of the hard problem of consciousness. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Have I got a Wikipedia article for you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
Chemistry is the same for each of us, as is physics, so I'd be inclined to think that red is the same red for everyone.
I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
It's a fun toy website.
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
I wouldn't assume most people do that. For me the last few looked basically the same so I selected the same color for all of them.
That's if you're matching about 40% of the population.
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.
That doesn’t explain why I landed 92% off the population median.
it's a binary search, not too surprising. search over a unidimensional ordered space
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.
That’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
There's no way for me to answer truthfully whether teal is blue or green. It is neither. Anything I give gives a false answer. The data is invalid.
Yeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
That is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
Ok, but presumably you can make a test that goes from 50% gray to 100% black and you have to say "this is black" or "this is gray"
No scientific line. But where does your mind put it if asked without being told which it is? This test is about where you perceive that line to be.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
Same here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.
Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.
:/
That makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="
I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.
No idea why
This makes no sense. It's like asking:
I recommend this reading: https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...
Someone should make a parody site asking whether shades of yellow are red or violet.
What if it was phrased differently?
Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"
Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"
Wow, crazy to see someone thinking there's an official objective color definition
Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.
> Colors are a fuzzy continuum
Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.
Their analogy is pretty on point.
You are confusing geographical position with countries.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy) Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
Seem to get ~172.
I feel the same way, after the first couple of responses, I was just thinking it's blue-green. So I just had to pick randomly.
A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
I suspect that asking people to pick on a visual spectrum would lead to most people clicking closer to the midpoint.
Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"
I got a 98-percentile result and realised my Mac had Night Shift turned on.
And what if you are wearing blue blocker readers? I am, and perhaps unsurprisingly my result was greener than average.
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
Maybe both are true, if someone grows up and learns through a specific monitor, maybe that will influence and define their blue definition.
Exactly, and how bright is your display compared to your surroundings at time of viewing?
followed by the number of rods and cones in your eyes, as well as their own sensitivity, as well as your language
72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
Curious how this looks for red/green colorblind folks?
Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?
--Edit--
My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:
> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Tried it on two displays, one I’m 82% green, the other I’m 75% blue.
While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
Same with Old and Middle Irish (1200 AD): "glas was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of gray"
I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue
For some reason, dragging the window makes the chart re-animate.
There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!
Any system of giving names to hues will necessarily use ranges.
I think the intent here is clear in context.
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.
Some languages don’t make a distinction. And if a language doesn’t have a word for green or blue it won’t have a word for brown or orange either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
In Japanese, the "go" traffic light is referred to as "blue."
Interesting. Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
How much does display calibration factor into this? I'm fairly confident it must impact the results, but unsure how much error it would introduce.
I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days
Ambient light color would play a bigger part, with modern displays being fairly good.
Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.
Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
Same here at 82%, although I don’t think I’m seeing blues as black.
I think your monitor or room lighting might just be different from others'
Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.
That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
Quite right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
I've got an anecdote that says that they don't.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
yep, this is the sort of question I pose to my kids. “How can you know that what you see as blue is not what I see as red?”
I find that fascinating as well! I hope tech will give us the answer in our lifetimes.
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
Can you accommodate with the implant?
No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
Also needs a button "this is both" for colors like cyan
I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.
This is great!
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
One of my eyes sees (very) slightly greener than the other one.
But with both eyes I got
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
I should test with one eye.
Very relevant complementary reading: https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...
Related:
Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
I forgot that my display is in night mode (reducing blue light intensity). And I ended up with "your boundary is bluer than 98% of the population."
Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.
I must be colourblind, most of those look the same on my phone.
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
If you're not colorblind, yes. More or less.
Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
>> Your boundary is at hue 177, bluer than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.
The About section at the end said most people average around 175.
I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.
I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
Warm blue vs cool blue is another interesting social question: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy
It looks like this project got forked and updated further https://ismycolor.com/
Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.
This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.
>> Your boundary is at hue 173, greener than 57% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
Also no way to account for the variation of LCD displays. The same "colour" can look different on two different panels
"teal" is the name for color "Moderate bluish green"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal
Yes, and since Teal is Cyan with 50% Value, you will often also see people use Cyan to refer to the boundary color between Blue and Green.
Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on
This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.
I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.
Im left delighted to find out something new, but left wanting to know how to use it.
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
Send it to a significant other, then discuss your differences. Will provide you with a new in-joke.
After 4 clicks, I can no longer decide whether it is green or blue. I would pick "neither" if it were offered
> Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
I want this but for blue vs. purple.
I just took it to mean is this more blue or green rather than literally blue or green. Correct answer is then 180, anything else is clearly a fail :)
I got hue 175 twice, but bluer than 66% of the population once and 59% the second time.
I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.
When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
cyan is neither blue nor green
Midori
This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
This is cyan!
it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.
EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue