color wheel with three spaces between the primary colors

These words go back more than fifteen centuries. Monosyllabic words are generally the oldest words in the English language - head, eye, nose, foot, cat, dog, cow, eat, drink, man, wife, house, sleep, rain, snow, sword, sheath, God…. Brevity often indicates an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) origin. The simple named colors are mostly monosyllabic English words - red, green, brown, black, white, gray. How many colors are there in the spectrum above? How many did I name? red Somewhere between 700 THz and 800 THz the world goes dark again. It always seems to look dark compared to other sources at equal intensity. As the frequency is increased, the perceived color gradually changes from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to violet.

With an adequately bright source, most humans begin to perceive a dull red starting somewhere around 400 THz (1 THz = 10 12 Hz). (The literal meaning of this word is 'single color', but the actual meaning is 'single frequency'.) Physicists call this monochromatic light. Let's start by determining what a typical person would see when looking at electromagnetic radiation of a single frequency. Once the visual information leaves the eye, basic physics ends and neurocognition takes over.Ĭolor is determined first by frequency. I don't feel qualified to say much about that end of this process. The neurons of the brain are probably best thought of as wetware - a fusion of hardware and software or maybe something completely different.

The brain is not like a computer with fixed hardware of transistors and capacitors executing some sort of software code. They eye is very much like a camera, but the brain is not at all like a video recorder. Here's where the biology kicks in, or maybe it's the psychology, or maybe it's both. This signal is processed by the part of the brain near the back of the skull (called the occipital lobe). Light falls on specialized receptor cells (called cones) at the back of the eye (called the retina) and a signal is sent to the brain along a neural pathway (called the optic nerve). Our perception of color is not an objective measure of anything about the light that enters our eyes, but it correlates pretty well with objective reality.Ĭolor is determined first by frequency and then by how those frequencies are combined when they reach they eye. Spectral power distributions exist in the physical world, but color exists only in the mind of the beholder. Objects don't have a color, they give off light that appears to be a color. Color is a function of the human visual system, and is not an intrinsic property.

Color wheel with three spaces between the primary colors