My Crazy Color Theory

Okay, before I begin, I was looking through my old posts to make sure I had never gone over this before, and I came across this entry about honesty. Here it is:

http://brainhickey.blogspot.com/2006/02/random-rant-about-honesty.html

If you want to read the whole thing, cool. But what I noticed was this passage:

I’ve always believed I would do something great in life; that’s what my mother always told me and I guess I always believed her. But I don’t have a clue what that something will be. Maybe I’ll be a published writer, maybe the mother of the next President of the USA (like his t-shirt says), or maybe I’ll develop some charity or something to really help the world.

So my first thought as I read this was, hey, if Sarah Palin can be the next-to-next President, heck, I'm in the PTA, I'm a soccer mom, I'm over 35. I can be president too. Now if we can just get rid of that pesky "born in the USA" rule...

The second thing I noticed was my mention of developing some charity. Perhaps the seed for Summer Santa had been planted long ago and I couldn't help but do it. Hmmm...

Now back to My Crazy Color Theory (can it really be going back to it if I never started explaining it?)

I've been reading to my two year old, and one of the books he likes is about colors. Each page mentions one color, and as (or after) you read, you point out things that are the same color as the ones mentioned in the book. The actual title doesn't matter, because that's the same point in all of the books. You provide examples of items in a particular color and teach the child to refer to all different things of the same hue value by a particular name. Different languages have different names for the same color, but that's just translation. A stop sign is red, the grass is green.

So we know that color blindness is when people can't see certain colors, or cannot detect the differences between certain colors. Or something like that (in the past, I would have spent a couple of hours googling and researching color blindness for this post; these days I'm lucky to get this far! Sorry!)

So here's my issue. We all agree that a stop sign is red, and we all call the color that we see on the stop sign "red". But how do we know that we all perceive the color the same way? How do we know that what I see as red is not what you see as blue, but we both call items of that color by the same name, so we assume we see the same thing the same way?

Think about it. Computer programs, color theory, paint samples. These all present a pretty consistent array of colors, organizing them by numeric values of hue, saturation, and value. There is a gradient progression of these colors. Go into your local paint store, or the paint section of your local big box hardware store, and you'll find a nicely-arranged display of color swatches. So it seems to make sense that we all view these colors such that this progression of colors makes sense to all of us.

But what if the differences are subtle? Maybe it's not blue to red or green to purple, but rather red to pink, or mauve to lavender? What if the differences between how your eyes perceive a particular color and how my eyes perceive that particular color are only slight? Then I would posit that the two people's perceptions of what colors complement each other would vary, so that what clashes to one person actually matches to another.

At least that's the excuse I'm going to use the next time my much-more-fashionable-than-me husband looks at me at my feeble attempts at coordinating my own outfits.